Timothy Gilfoyle Awarded SHCY Best Article Prize

Joe Austin's Report from the 2003-2004 SHCY Awards Committee

Timothy Gilfoyle(right) accepting award from Awards Committee chair, Joe Austin. ~~~

Reports from awards committees often begin with phrases like "After considerable debate and negotiation...,"  suggesting that a haggard and weary chair has refereed the divergent opinions and priorities of a fractured committee, concluding with a selection that satisfies most, but pleases very few. Breaking with that tradition, I am very pleased to report that the SHCY 2003-2004 Best Article Award committee selected Timothy Gilfoyle's article, "Street-Rats and Gutter-Snipes: Child Pickpockets and Street Culture in New York City, 1850-1900" [Journal of Social History 37.4 (2004) 853-862], by a unanimous vote on the first ballot.

In this highly original scholarly work, Gilfoyle argues that, "in certain ways, pickpocketing emerged as an underground alternative to the traditional but vanishing forms of apprenticeship in the new urban market economy" (p.861). The committee was particularly impressed with Gilfoyle's skillful reconstruction of a youthful petty-criminal subculture from bits of information derived from a very thorough examination of a wide range of historical sources: court records, biographies and autobiographies, state reports, newspapers, popular non-fiction, and official archives, among others. Although the article does not mention these terms, it admirably demonstrates the dialogic relationships between the institutionalized practices of childhood and the lived experience of children, both of which were located within the specific contexts of late 19th century New York City. The article is a model of clarity and organization, and accessible to most undergraduates; I recommend it for classes on the history of children and youth at all levels.

Timothy Gilfoyle is a professor in the History department at Loyola University in Chicago, and received two awards for his book, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: W.W.Norton, 1992; paperback, 1994). The author of over 50 journal publications, he is currently working on three projects, including a A Pickpocket's Tale: Inside the Criminal World of Nineteenth-Century New York which will be published by W.W. Norton in 2006; Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark, to be jointly published by the University of Chicago Press and the Chicago Historical Society in 2006; and The Flash Press: Sporting Men's Weeklies in the 1840s, coauthored with Patricia Cline Cohen and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz and to be published by the University of Chicago Press. The 2003-2004 SHCY Best Article Awards Committee included Joe Austin (chair), Paula Fass, and Heather Prescott.