Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History Winner

Congratulations to Envisioning Seneca Village on being selected as the 2025 winner of the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History!

Envisioning Seneca Village is a project depicting what this significant nineteenth-century village might have looked like in the spring of 1855, about two years before it was destroyed by the City of New York to build Central Park. It features an interactive 3D model, a non-interactive tour through the 3D model (A Tour through the Visualization), a printable PDF guide with maps (A Map-based Tour), and supplementary materials. The project is anchored in extensive scholarship and aims to make the village’s history visible to a wide audience.

The project is a collaboration between Gergely Baics, Meredith Linn, Leah Meisterlin, and Myles Zhang. The team also included research assistants: Barnard College students Sarah Baybeck, Maia Donald, and Jesse Pearce. Additional support has been provided by the Central Park Conservancy and generous guidance from many advisors.

The Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History is sponsored jointly by the AHA and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University (GMU). It was developed by friends and colleagues of Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007), the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at GMU, to honor his life and work as a pioneer in the field of digital history.

This prize is awarded annually to honor and support work on a creative and freely available new media project, and in particular for work that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history. The current prize amount is $4,000, funded by donations to GMU’s AHA/RRCHNM Rosenzweig Prize Fund.

If you would like to contribute to this prize, you can visit our donations website.