Three faculty members in the University of Delaware Department of History have received prestigious national and international prizes for books published in 2024, a remarkable concentration of scholarly recognition that reflects the depth of research excellence in the department.

David Suisman, professor of history, received the Greg Tate Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Award for Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America's Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2024). The book is a first-of-its-kind study of music in the lives of American soldiers, tracing how the U.S. military has used and continues to use music to train soldiers and regulate military life, as well as how soldiers themselves have turned to music to cope with the emotional and psychological realities of war.

Print Markets and Political Dissent: Publishers in Central Europe, 1800–1870 by James Brophy, Francis H. Squire Professor of History, won the Hans Rosenberg Prize of the Central European History Society for the best book in German history and the Barclay Book Prize of the German Studies Association for the best monograph in 19th and 20th-century German history. The book examines publishers as brokers of Central Europe's political public sphere, demonstrating how the publishing industry operated both within and outside legal parameters to contest censorship and foster political literacy during the era of Prussian and Austrian absolutism.

A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I by Polly Zavadivker, associate professor of history and director of the Jewish Studies program, won the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies and was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. The book draws on hundreds of documents from previously inaccessible archives, the Russian and Yiddish press and personal accounts to uncover the largely untold history of how Jewish civilians experienced the war and its violent epicenter on the Eastern Front.

Department chair Owen White expressed pride in the faculty's achievements. "I am proud to work in a department with so many accomplished scholars," White said. “To research and write an original work of historical scholarship can take ten years, if not longer, so it's amazing that no fewer than seven history faculty published books last academic year.”

Taken together, the three books span American cultural history, Central European political history and Eastern European Jewish history, a breadth that speaks to the range of expertise within the department and the impact UD historians are having on their respective fields.