Jan de Vries Awarded Heineken Prize for History

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded the 2000 Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for History to AHA member Jan de Vries, professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, "for his pioneering research into the development of the European economy between 1500 and 1800."

Jan de Vries obtained his PhD from Yale University in 1970 and has been teaching at the University of California at Berkeley since 1977. He is the author of several books, including The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500-1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), and Barges and Capitalism: Passenger Transportation in the Dutch Economy, 1632-1839 (Utrecht: Hes Publishers, 1981). He was the coauthor (with Ad van der Woude) of the standard work, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy from 1500 to 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), which received the Gyorgy Ranki Prize for the best book on the economic history of Europe.

The Heineken Prizes (of $150,000) are awarded every two years in the fields of history, biochemistry and biophysics, Dutch art, medicine, and the environment. The prizes were instituted in 1964.

Gettysburg College Launches eHistory Prize

A new annual prize for the best web site, CD-ROM, or other scholarly electronic tool that explores the Civil War era has been launched by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College.

The winner or winners of the inaugural "eLincoln Prize," which carries a $50,000 award, will be announced on Lincoln's birthday (February 12) in 2001, along with the winners of the institute's Lincoln Prize, an annual prize for the best work in the Civil War field.

The new prize, like the older prize, is endowed by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman.

Gabor Boritt, the chair of the Lincoln Prize Board of Trustees at the institute, said that the new prize is expected to speed the development of the Internet's potential in the field of history.

The inaugural jury for the eLincoln Prize will be composed of Janice Reiff (UCLA), David Herbert Donald (Harvard University), and Drew Gilpin Faust (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study).

Details about the prize can be obtained from the Civil War Institute, Gettysburg College, 233 N. Washington St., Gettysburg, PA 17325. (717) 337-6590.

Library of Congress Adds to Its Online Collections

The Library of Congress American Memory web site (http://www.loc.gov) has been further enhanced by the addition of new collections from the archives of the library and of other institutions. The digitization of the Thomas Jefferson papers at the library has been completed and 27,000 documents and 83,000 images are now available online.

Among other new treasures made available online are more than 100 sound recordings (made between 1938 and 1941) of blues and gospel songs; census atlases from 1870 through 1920; a selection of 19th-century railroad maps; and 2,300 photographs and 7,700 pages of text relating to Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest.