2019 King V. Hostick Scholarship Awards

This week the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and the Illinois State Historical Society announced the 2019 recipients of the King V. Hostick Scholarships, awarded to graduate history students who have completed all but their dissertations and are visiting Illinois libraries to complete their research.

The scholarships are named for King V. Hostick, a Springfield collector of Lincoln materials whose bequest in the early 1990s created an endowed gift that has supported Illinois research at the graduate level for more than fifty scholars. Scholarships are based on need and require research at Illinois-based libraries and collections such as the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library), the Chicago History Museum, The Newberry Library, the University of Illinois, and other institutions.

This year’s Hostick scholars are:

Lawrence Celani, Department of History, University of Missouri, Columbia. Mr. Celani’s research project is a political and economic study of the territories that would become the states of Illinois and Missouri, and how they were socially, economically, and politically altered by the Civil War.

Meagan T. Frenzer, Department of History, University of Florida, Gainesville. Ms. Frenzer’s dissertation is titled “Dancing in the Devil’s Playground: The Intersection of Labor, Morality, and Pleasure in Chicago’s Dance Halls, 1910-1930.” Ms. Frenzer’s research will contribute to our historical understanding of social reform efforts in the early 20th century, and the communities that made dance halls part of the fabric of life in Chicago.

Katherina King, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg, Germany. Ms. King is an international scholar whose dissertation, “African-American Women Writers and the WPA,” will bring her to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and other state institutions this summer to explore the collections Margaret Walker, Dorothy West, Zora Neale Hurston, and other members of the Chicago Black Renaissance.

Wayne Duerkes, Department of History, Iowa State University of Science and Technology, Ames. Mr. Duerkes’s research project, “Market and Community Development in North Central Illinois, 1833-1852,” is described as a “microhistory of north-central Illinois” and “a study of community settlement and market development from the end of the Black Hawk Wars to the early years of railroad building” in LaSalle, DeKalb, and Kendall counties.

This year scholarship amounts range from $1,700 to $3,500 with a maximum of $15,000 awarded annually, with both the ALPLM and ISHS contributing $7,500. Hostick Scholarship applications for 2020 are due March 31, 2020. For more information visit the ISHS website, www.historyillinois.org.