Outstanding Student Historians Honored at Bisbee Tea

This year’s Bisbee Prize recipients tackled everything from farm workers’ rights and the California Gold Rush to the impact of female war correspondents during World War II. 

The student winners presented their work at the Ethan Bisbee Tea and Social Science Forum, speaking informally with visitors about how they chose their subjects and what their research revealed. A Milton tradition since 1983, the Bisbee Prize is awarded to students with the best U.S. History research papers. 

In 2023, the History and Social Sciences Department expanded the tea to recognize outstanding work in the social sciences. These research projects covered current social issues, including the U.S. approach to its rising national debt and a deep dive into the ongoing health effects of a former munitions site in southeastern Massachusetts. 

Bisbee Prize recipients

Lukas Caggiano ’26: The Octopus Unbound: Horizontal Integration and the Rise of Standard Oil 
 

Lyra Dvorin ’28: “Abject Cowardice” and Public Image: Debunking the Myth of Harvard University’s Resistance Against McCarthyism
 

Kaia Evans ’27: The United Farm Worker Brand: Hagiography, Hypocrisy, and the Decline of a Movement
 

Solomon M. Fleiss ’28: A River Runs Through It: Water Supply, Brookline’s Rejection of Annexation by Boston, and Suburbanization
 

Jiner Huang ’28: Stability Over Revolution: Civil War Thinking and American Pragmatism in Qing China
 

William Lara McCannon ’28: Why Don’t We Have National Health Care?
 

Margot Murphy-Hara ’28: Uneasy Tradeoffs: Workers’ Rights vs. Women’s Rights is Muller vs. Oregon
 

Rachel Pang ’27: The Price of Inclusion: Civil Rights, National Identity, and the Containment of Black Radicalism 
 

Meshva Patel ’28: Operation Wetback: The Removal of the United States’ Economic Backbone
 

Riley Qiu ’28: Bleeding Hearts and Bylines: How Female War Correspondents Redefined War, Gender, and Journalism in World War II
 

Brayden Robinson ’27: Government Suppression of the Industrial Workers of the World
 

Michael Rosa ’28: The Price of Gold: The California Gold Rush and its Deadly Impact on Native American Society
 

Gideon Weiss ’28: An Ethnicity Divided: How the American Jewish Community Fractured along Socio-Economic Lines during the Great Wave Migration
 

Social Science Forum recipients

Emlyn Joseph ’27: The “Trust Deficit”: Addressing the U.S. Monetary Framework to Address Rising National Debt
 

Shira Keitner ’27: Hanover Fireworks Site
 

Darby Yang ’27: A “Moonshot Approach” to Improving the Mass and Cass