The Society for U.S. Intellectual History is excited to announce the winner of the 2026 Dorothy Ross prize, Dr. Meagan Wierda for “Statistics ‘in Relation to Themselves’: African American Activists, the Census of 1840, and the Radical Potential of Quantification” (published in the Journal of the Early Republic).
This award goes to an emerging scholar, defined as a current graduate student or a scholar within five years of receiving the PhD. The article must have appeared in an academic journal in the 2023 calendar year and may be submitted by the author, editor, or others. The winner receives $500. Many thanks to the committee (Nicholas DiPucchio, Abigail Modaff, Austin Clements)!
Meagan Wierda is Assistant Professor of History at the Université de Montréal. She is currently working on her first book project, under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press, about who gets to count within the antebellum United States. She writes about who gets to count within the antebellum United States.
The committee writes: The Dorothy Ross Prize Committee enjoyed reading this year’s fantastic submissions. The committee learned about topics ranging from dance to medicine to historiographical trends in intellectual history. These emerging scholars have extended US intellectual history into diverse historiographical directions, and their work makes us excited for the future of S-USIH.
After an engaging discussion, we are delighted to select Meagan Wierda’s “Statistics ‘in Relation to Themselves’: African American Activists, the Census of 1840, and the Radical Potential of Quantification” (published in the Journal of the Early Republic) for the 2026 Dorothy Ross Prize.
Americans are obsessed with statistical data. Whether a social media post or a national television broadcast, political commentators deploy stats to advance their aims. Wierda’s article reminds us how much this experience has been embedded in our political process. Wierda uncovers how Black New Yorkers effectively employed census data to challenge pro-slavery arguments and advance the cause of emancipation. Wierda focuses on the reactions and uses of the Census of 1840. Pro-slavery advocates used census data to support their racist arguments about the benefits of slavery and dangers of emancipation for Black Americans. Black New Yorkers, however, flipped the script. Abolitionists such as James McCune Smith quantified the life expectancy of the enslaved compared to that of free Black Americans to undermine these pro-slavery arguments. Wierda’s nuanced, engaging article reveals how Black Americans saw the liberatory potential of quantification.
The committee was particularly impressed how Wierda upended commonplace assumptions about antebellum slavery. The article demonstrates a deep knowledge of several strands of historiography ranging from quantification studies to antebellum slavery to nineteenth-century American political culture. Wierda synthesizes these fields to make clear interventions. Historians have often underscored how quantification had been used by pro-slavery Americans to commodify enslaved people of African descent. Yet, Wierda recovers “the ways in which Black activists expanded the political as well as epistemological valence of numbers to include their radical aims.”
Wierda also reveals how Black activists circumvented the infamous “gag rule”—a measure often employed to table antislavery measures in Congress. By framing their memorial to Congress not as a challenge to slavery but instead a protest against the inaccuracies of the 1840 census, Black New Yorkers managed to get their antiracist petition to reach the Senate floor. On the whole, Wierda’s article invites future discussions about the antiracist uses of quantification and serves as a model for emerging scholars on how to make a powerful historiographical intervention.
The Dorothy Ross Prize Committee would like to thank the authors who shared their research with us. On the whole, the committee was deeply impressed by the quality of the submissions. These articles remind us of the vibrant evolution and growth of US intellectual history. S-USIH has a bright future!
0