2015 Pritzker Literature Award Presentation: David Hackett Fischer

Pulitzer Prize winning historian, best-selling author, and Brandeis University Professor David Hackett Fischer addresses the audience at the 2015 Liberty Gala following the official presentation of the 2015 Pritzker Military Museum & Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.

Author of 15 major publications on topics ranging from the American Revolution to the logic of historical thought, David Hackett Fischer received the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award in 2006 for his “pivotal role in reviving popular and academic interest in American history and its lessons for the present.”

Among his notable works are bestsellers and award-winners like Washington’s Crossing, a National Book Award finalist and 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for history; Paul Revere’s Ride, a 1996 Boston Globe Top 10 Book of the Year; Champlain’s Dream, an internationally acclaimed biography published in English and French; and Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, a groundbreaking study of the roots of essential American traits—a second volume of which is now in progress.

A graduate of Princeton University (A.B., 1958) and the Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D., 1962), Fischer is University Professor and Earl Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he has served on the faculty for more than 50 years. A recipient of numerous teaching awards over his long and distinguished career— including the 1990 Carnegie Prize as Massachusetts Professor of the Year and the Louis Dembitz Brandeis Prize for Excellence in Teaching—Fischer has held visiting professorships at Harvard University, The University of Oxford, the University of Washington, and several institutions in New Zealand.