Vincent DiGirolamo is Associate Professor of History and director of American Studies at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He specializes in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a focus on workers, children, immigrants, city life, and visual and print culture. He is the author of Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the Turner, Taft, Mott, Palmegiano, and DeSantis prizes in History.
His writing has appeared in academic journals, anthologies, and popular periodicals, including Time magazine, the London Times, American Heritage, and the San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle. DiGirolamo’s research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Antiquarian Society, Woodrow Wilson Society, and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation, among others.
An avid practitioner of public history, DiGirolamo has contributed to exhibitions at the Newark Public Library, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the New-York Historical Society. He has lectured and created digital essays and teaching modules for the American Social History Project’s online textbook Who Built America? and its Investigating U.S. History website. His subjects have included the Sand Creek Massacre, Jacob Riis’s photographs, Ellis Island, and the 1934 West Coast maritime strike.
Originally from Monterey, California, he co-produced the award-winning PBS documentary Monterey’s Boat People and published the young adult novel Whispers Under the Wharf: A Monterey Ghost Story (Fithian Press, 1990). He received his BA in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, his MA in Comparative Social History from UC Santa Cruz, and his PhD in history from Princeton University. In 2024, he was elected to the New York Academy of History.