Heather Furnas Collection of Sidney Hillman Foundation Awards Research Materials

The Hillman Prize has been granted annually by the Sidney Hillman Foundation since 1950 in categories that included Book, Newspaper, and Magazine. The Foundation did not keep complete citations for the articles, nor retain copies of the award-winning submissions. Heather Furnas was contracted by the Hillman Foundation in order to locate the citations for the award-winning newspaper and magazine articles and to obtain copies when possible. Included in the collection is an excel document with tabs for each of the prize categories. The researcher included the complete citation, links if available and indicated if digital copies were obtained. In separate files, there are .pdf files of what the researcher determined to be the winning articles, organized by type of publication and year.

At a later date, the researcher was asked to locate transcripts of the lectures that were a part of the Hillman Lectureship Program. If a transcript was located, a copy was placed in the Lectures folder. The researcher also tried to obtain newspaper articles regarding these lectures, especially if they gave summaries. The best place to obtain a complete list of the lecturers is in the "Twenty-Year Report," found Collection #5619/040 Box 2, Folder 8 and copied into this collection. There is also a complete listing of the Reprint Series.

Some newspaper citations were particularly difficult to track down, and are therefore based on the researcher's best determination. Some awards were granted without titles of particular articles, but rather the body of work of the journalist and themes that were addressed. For example, Murray Kempton was granted the first newspaper award in 1950 for articles on "labor in the south." The digital files obtained on Murray Kempton come from the clippings file in Box 1 Folder 3 (1950) in the Murray Kempton Papers at Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. They are unsorted, and the researcher did not make a determination on which articles won the prize.

Also included in the collection are photocopies from Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections at Montana State University, which hold the papers for Harry L. and Gretchen Billings, newspaper award winners in 1958 for their "editorials on civil liberties and public welfare system" in the People's Voice. These copies come from collection #2095, Box 2, Folder 28-32, which are all labeled "Hillman Award Correspondence"; "Hillman Award Clippings" come from Box 2, Folder 33. These documents might reveal to researchers the process of nomination and selection for the prizes in general, and these award winners in particular, but do not contain the newspaper articles.