Maureen Healy, Oregon State University historian, wins top book prize in European History category

Oregon State University historian Maureen Healy has learned from the American Historical Association that her book, "Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire," has won this year's Herbert Baxter Adams Prize to be awarded at the society's annual meeting in January of 2006.

The Adams Prize is the top prize that the association bestows in European history. Healy is the first member of the OSU History Department faculty ever to have received this award, which is given annually for a distinguished first book by a young scholar in the field of European history.

In "Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire," published by Cambridge University Press, Healy examines the collapse of the empire from the perspective of everyday life in the capital. She argues that a striking effect of "total war" on the home front was the spread of a war mentality to the sites of daily life such as streets, shops, schools, entertainment venues, and apartment houses.

While great armies clashed on distant battlefields, Healy points out, the multi-ethnic civilian population of Vienna waged a protracted, socially devastating war against each other as they grappled with severe material shortages and eventually with near-famine. Vienna fell into civilian mutiny before the state collapsed in 1918, and Healy uses the results of meticulous archival research to show how ordinary men, women, and children conceived of Austria during the empire's death throes.

The Adams Prize was established in 1905 in memory of the first secretary of the American Historical Association, Herbert Baxter Adams of Johns Hopkins University, who also co-founded the organization.