The Society for U.S. Intellectual History is excited to announce the winner of the 2026 Leo P. Ribuffo Prize for Best Dissertation in United States Intellectual History is Thomas Own Cryer, for his dissertation: “‘Walking the Tightrope’: John Hope Franklin and the Dilemmas of African American History in Action.”
The Society for U.S. Intellectual History established the Leo P. Ribuffo Prize for Best Dissertation in U.S. Intellectual History in 2023. Ribuffo, a revered scholar and exemplary mentor, reshaped the field during his long and illustrious career at George Washington University. The award seeks to honor his life and career by recognizing the distinguished work of emerging scholars and to advance the highest levels of research, writing, and scholarship. Many thanks to the committee (Sarah Gardner, Ben Park, and Lora Burnett) for their thoughtful work.
Dr Thomas Cryer is a historian of the twentieth-century United States specialising in the intersecting histories of education, ideas, memory, and race. Taken as a whole, his research interrogates how historical narratives have been strategically appropriated, distorted, and mobilised to serve contemporary political agendas. Before arriving in Oxford, ( he completed a BA (Hons) in History and an MPhil in American History at Cambridge and a PhD in American History at University College London’s Institute of the Americas. (https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/people/thomas-cryer)
The committee writes: Cryer’s dissertation, offers a theoretically sophisticated, and compellingly written, narrative that allows scholars and students a way into Black intellectualism. (And it is simply an excellent biography of John Hope Franklin!)
Franklin, author of From Slavery to Freedom (1947), was a prolific author, thus giving Cryer a robust body of work to engage in the intellectual biography of his thesis.
Of course, Franklin was a titan in the field. Among his works are Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961), a seminal work in the field; additional works include Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, co-authored with Loren Schweninger (1999), and George Washington Williams: A Biography (1985), a chronicle of the life of a controversial self-made Black intellectual. He delivered the American Historical Association’s Presidential Address in 1979, a speech in which he noted that perhaps no human experience is more searing or more likely to have long-range adverse effect on the participants than violent conflict among peoples of the same national, racial, or ethnic group.
As Cryer acknowledges, the prevailing characterization of Franklin is of the diplomatic Black thinker. That said, such a reading ignores Franklin’s increasingly strident rhetoric and risks sanitizing a scholarship that that advocated for knowledge and voices that remain socially marginalized.
Cryer observes that Franklin’s public intellectual practice represented a dissident Americanism that highlighted the hypocrisies of the American project, a project that focused on the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, a language that could hardly be made good in Jim Crow America. That said, despite Franklin’s sometimes pointed questioning of traditional American thinking, he became the preeminent late twentieth-century African American historian, and was celebrated enough to provide testimony in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case.
Equally important, Cryer’s thesis reveals how radicalization of knowledge and expertise profoundly shaped twentieth-century higher education.
Franklin had his own inner struggles. As Cryer notes, he had to carefully “negotiate between racial enclosure, commercial exploitation, and intellectual co-optation, requiring an often exhausting awareness of the political, racial, and social boundaries that limited his expression and ways of being within academic and public spaces.”
Cryer sees his work as a way to offer valuable insights for the general public – including administrators, educators, and policymakers who seek to dismantle racial barriers – not just a narrow audience of scholars. Importantly, he offers the larger context in which Franklin lived, worked, and learned, and thus advances the global reach of Franklin’s work.
0