Paul Birdsall Prize


The Paul Birdsall Prize is an biennial prize given to a historian by the American Historical Association.

Background

The prize was established by a generous gift from Professor Hans Gatzke, who remained anonymous until his death. Paul Birdsall was a historian of European diplomatic and military affairs and a foreign service officer.

Eligibility

Preference will be given to early-career academics, but established scholars and nonacademic candidates will not be excluded.
Books published in English and bearing a copyright of 2016 or 2017 are eligible for the 2018 prize..

Notable winners

Past winners of the prize include:
1986: Robert A. Doughty for The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919-1939
1990: Brian Villa for Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid
1992: Dennis Showalter for Tannenberg: Clash of Empires 1914
1994: Leonard V. Smith for Between Mutiny and Obedience
1996: David G. Herrmann for The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War
1998: John F. Beeler for British Naval Policy in the Gladstone-Disraeli Era, 1866-1880
2000: Marc Trachtenberg for A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963
2002: Matthew Connelly for A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era
2004: Robert M. Citino for Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare
2006: Mark Atwood Lawrence for Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam
2008: Jeffrey A. Engel for Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Aviation Fight for Supremacy
2010: Jonathan Reed Winkler for Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I
2012: Edith Sheffer for Burned Bridge: how East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain
2014: Jacob Darwin Hamblin for Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism
2016: Bruno Cabanes for The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924
2018: Tarak Barkawi for Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II