By Sara Zaske

Maureen Healy wins one of the most coveted awards ever given to an OSU historian with a new book about everyday life during World War I.

Maureen Healy sometimes wonders how future historians will write about current times.

Recent decades might be distilled into bills passed by Congress and the official actions of the Bush and Clinton presidential administrations. Future students might learn about the Iraq war by memorizing dates, counting troops and analyzing military strategies.

“I wonder if I would recognize it as an ordinary person who lived through it,” said Healy recently in her history department office at OSU. “Will the future story look familiar or will it be something that is written from the top? It makes me think that there is stuff going on in everyday life that is worthy of looking at.”

The power of ordinary experience is the focus of the Healy’s Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and EverydayLife in World War I. Called a “tour de force” by one reviewer, Healy’s book recently won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, which is given to a European history scholar for a first published work. To historians, the Baxter Adams prize is a huge honor. It is like winning a Pulitzer to a journalist or an MVP to an athlete. Healy, an assistant professor of history, is the only Oregon State historian ever to have won this award.

Maureen Healy examines history in terms of what’s happening in the lives of ordinary citizens.