Maxine Lurie Distinguished Service Award

The New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance (NJSAA) has created a special annual award to recognize a career of important contributions to the field of New Jersey Studies. The Maxine N. Lurie Distinguished Achievement Award recognizes outstanding achievements in any area of the study and presentation of New Jersey history to a broad audience, as well as significant service to the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance.

The Academic Alliance is an association of scholars, academics, librarians, archivists, museum personnel, teachers, and others who study, write about, and teach about New Jersey. Its meetings provide a forum for scholars to discuss their work and its awards recognize the achievements of others in the field of New Jersey studies.

NJSAA will present the inaugural award to Maxine N. Lurie herself at Archives and History Day in October, at the Monmouth County Library in Manalapan, New Jersey. 

Professor Lurie’s many accomplishments include public service, scholarship, and education, including the development and support of New Jersey studies programs for a broad audience that includes teachers. Her achievements have been recognized by numerous honors and awards.

Public Service

Professor Lurie is a cofounder of the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance and was its cochair then its chair from 1992 to 2018. She has been a member of the State Historical Records Advisory Board since 1997. Perhaps her greatest impact on New Jersey studies has been her

sixteen-year tenure as a member of the New Jersey Historical Commission, which she has served as chair of the Committee on Grants and Prizes, vice-chair of the Commission, and, since 2013, the Commission’s chair.

Scholarship

Her scholarly works and chapters in the books of others include Minutes of the East Jersey Proprietors 1764-1794 (coedited with Joanne Walroth; New Jersey Historical Society, 1985); A New Jersey Anthology (compiler and editor; New Jersey Historical Society, 1994; reprinted by Rutgers University Press, 2002; second edition, RUP, 2010); Encyclopedia of New Jersey (coeditor-in-chief, with Marc Mappen; RUP, 2004); Mapping New Jersey: An Evolving Landscape (coedited with Peter O. Wacker, cartography by Michael Siegel; RUP, 2009); New Jersey: A History of the Garden State (coedited with Richard Veit; author of chapter two, “Early New Jersey: The Colonial Period”; RUP, 2012); Envisioning New Jersey: An Illustrated History of the Garden State (coauthor with Richard Veit; RUP, 2016); “New Jersey: Radical or Conservative in the Crisis Summer of 1776,” in Barbara Mitnick, ed., New Jersey in the American Revolution (RUP, 2005); and “New Jersey: The Long Lived Proprietary,” in L. H. Roper and B. Van Ruymbeke, eds., Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750 (Brill, 2007). Two of these books fall into the category of works much desired that many thought would never exist: Mapping New Jersey: An Evolving Landscape is the badly-needed historical atlas; and New Jersey: A History of the Garden State is the one-volume New Jersey history many thought could not be done.

Professor Lurie was a founder of the on-line scholarly journal, New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and serves as a member of its editorial advisory board.

Teaching

Maxine Lurie has taught American and New Jersey history at Seton Hall University for twenty-six years. She retired as chair and professor of history in 2010 and has served as a professor emerita since then. She teaches one of the state’s few undergraduate New Jersey history seminars and has stimulated others to teach similar courses at their institutions. She has also taught at the University of Wisconsin (where she received her Ph. D. in American history), Marquette University, and Rutgers University.

For twenty-five years, 1990-2015, she organized and presented after-school seminars and one-day teachers’ workshops for the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis’s Institute for Secondary Teachers. In 2001 and 20002 she presented week-long teachers’ seminars for the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and from 2003 to 2010 was a featured presenter for New Jersey schools in a Teaching American History Projects series funded by the U. S. Department of Education. She is a former member of New Jersey National History Day’s advisory board and has been a New Jersey National History Day judge for more than a decade.

Awards and Honors

Professor Lurie and her works have been much awarded. The Historical Commission gave her its highest honor, the Richard J. Hughes Award, in 1997 for her many outstanding contributions to the study and teaching of New Jersey history. Also in 1997, she received the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference’s Service Award, and in 2009 was named Seton Hall University’s Arts and Humanities Researcher of the Year. The Encyclopedia of New Jersey received special recognition from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the New York Public Library, the Academic Alliance, and the New Jersey Center for the Book. The American Association for State and Local History awarded Envisioning New Jersey an Award of Merit in 2018, and four of her books received NJSAA Author Awards: Mapping New Jersey (2010), A New Jersey Anthology (second edition, 2012), New Jersey: A History of the Garden State (2013), and Envisioning New Jersey (2017). She also received the New Jersey National History Day Educator of the Year for Service award in 2017.

2023 - Deborah Mercer 

Deborah Mercer served as the New Jersey Collections Librarian at the New Jersey State Library from 2002 to 2023. Deborah's career has been marked by a deep commitment to fostering open access to New Jersey’s historical, legal and cultural resources.

Deborah joined the State Library in 2000 and in 2002 she assumed the responsibility for the New Jersey and Rare Books collections. During her tenure, she played a pivotal role in expanding the library's  physical and digital collections in order to provide an appreciation of the state's history. Her  efforts in acquiring, cataloging, and digitizing these materials ensured that they remained accessible to researchers, educators, and the general public for generations to come.

In 2012 she implemented and developed the New Jersey State Publications Digital Library, an archive of digitized and born digital New Jersey government publications, now numbering over 90,000 items, which provide insights into the development of New Jersey’s legal and governmental history. 

Deborah joined the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance in 2015 as the Chair of the Author Awards program. The New Jersey author awards program was established in 1994 with the purpose of encouraging books about New Jersey and fostering a deeper connection between residents and their history.  During her tenure she and the Committee were instrumental in revising the evaluation criteria and in expanding outreach to authors providing them with recognition and encouragement.

2022 - Paul Israel

The Maxine N. Lurie Distinguished Achievement Award recognizes outstanding achievements in any area of the study and presentation of New Jersey history to a broad audience, as well as significant service to the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance. This year’s winner, Paul Israel of Highland Park, is director and general editor at Rutgers University of the Thomas A. Edison Papers, which has produced nine volumes of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison as well as an online digital image edition with more than 150,000 documents to date. In 2005, the Society for the History of Technology awarded the Edison Papers a special, one-time retrospective award as a model reference work published since the founding of the Society 1958.

Paul Israel joined the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance in 2011 and since then has been very actively involved as a board member and, since 2013, chair of the selection committee for the NJSAA Graduate Student Award, which recognizes excellence in graduate writing about New Jersey history. Award winners get a cash prize and have the honor of presenting their work at an NJSAA meeting and seeing it published in the journal, New Jersey Studies, on which Dr. Israel has served on the editorial board since 2015.

Dr. Israel has authored authoritative journal articles, book chapters, and three books on the history of technology, including Edison: A Life of Invention (Wiley & Sons, 1998), for which he won the Edelstein [Dexter] Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. He is a frequent consultant and contributor to projects seeking material about Edison and invention, including more than forty television and radio documentaries as well as innumerable lectures.

Dr. Israel teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the history of technology at Rutgers and has participated in numerous workshops for teachers that examine the history of industrialization and technological innovation in New Jersey and in the nation more broadly. He has also been involved in developing or revising exhibits and interpretive programs at several museums and historic sites, including at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange and the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park where he also serves on the board.

2021 - Richard Waldron

The New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance is very pleased to present the Maxine Lurie Distinguished Service Award to Richard Waldron, who has had a long career of service to both the New Jersey Studies community and NJSAA. After working for the New Jersey State Museum, Dick joined the New Jersey Historical Commission (NJHC) and served in a variety of capacities, including Executive Director (1991–1999). Among his accomplishments at NJHC was compiling a new edition of Historical Organizations in New Jersey: A Directory (1977) and helping, along with Maxine Lurie and Karl Niederer, to launch the CAPES archival consulting service in 1988. In 1999, he became Executive Director of the American Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia that documents the history of Sweden and Swedish America, especially the colony of New Sweden (1638-55), part of which was in what is now New Jersey. He is the coeditor of New Sweden in America, the proceedings of a 1988 conference to commemorate New Sweden’s 350th anniversary.

Waldron was an NJSAA founding member in 1992 and for many years has been Treasurer and Chair of the Paul Stellhorn Award Committee that evaluates and gives awards to undergraduate students for research papers they have written on aspects of New Jersey history. He advertises the award, collects the papers, arranges for reviewers, and then helps arrange for the winners to receive the prizes and encourages them to submit their work for an NJSAA public lecture and for publication in the online journal, New Jersey Studies.

In other work relevant to this award, Waldron has been an adjunct history professor at Kean University, Rutgers University (New Brunswick), and Seton Hall University. He has spent much of his career helping to organize public education programs, including the NJHC’s annual history conference, the annual New Jersey History Issues Convention (with many sponsors), and the annual New Sweden History Conference of the American Swedish Historical Museum and the Swedish Colonial Society. His other publications include (with Mary R. Murrin), New Jersey History: An Annotated and Selected Introductory Bibliography, last revised in 2015; “New Sweden: An Interpretation,” in Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America (2005); and Maritime New Jersey: An Economic History of the Coast (1983).

2020 - Ronald Becker

In a career beginning in 1974, Ron Becker demonstrated outstanding leadership and commitment to New Jersey history, libraries, and archives. As Head of Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives from 1991 to 2016, Ron exerted a lasting influence on New Jersey scholarship and bibliography.

Ron promoted New Jersey studies by welcoming and encouraging all types of scholars, from aspiring researchers to retirees, from undergraduates to post-docs, from fourth graders to visiting Harvard professors. Ron’s tireless efforts included fundraising, presenting programs, writing articles, editing the Mid-Atlantic Archivist, reviewing grants, judging National History Day presentations, and serving on countless committees and editorial boards, all in the service of New Jersey studies.

As a founding member of the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance, Ron has been a constant advocate for our group. He provided NJSAA with a central meeting place, where parking passes, hot coffee, and warm fellowship were guaranteed.