Marcus History Day Prize

Jacob Roth (center), 2019 Marcus History Day Prize winner, Linda Ries (left), editor of Pennsylvania History, and Calliope Volikas (right), his teacher.

Irwin Marcus was a member of the history faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania from 1965 until his retirement in 2002. For the entire period that IUP has been hosting a regional History Day Competition, and continuing for a decade following his retirement, Dr. Marcus served as a judge for both junior and senior papers each History Day. Everyone at IUP has fond memories of Dr. Marcus sitting with students, discussing their papers, and encouraging them in their historical interests. Following his death in 2016, his family established an annual Irwin Marcus History Day award through the Pennsylvania Historical Association for the best senior paper on Pennsylvania history in order to continue his acknowledgment and encouragement of young historians.

October 2022

Brontë Short, ““It Is a Terror … That Men Should Be Handlelled So in Pennsylvania”: Early Quaker Reasoning, Debate, and the Abolitionist Influence of the Germantown Friends’ Protest Against Slavery.”

October 2021

Alice Padula, ““The World Was Thinking Wrong About Race”: W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro.”

October 2020

Shaughnessea Richardson, “Conquering the Barriers Between Nature and Man: Rachel Carson and the Modern Environmental Movement.”

OCTOBER 2019

Jacob Roth, “Bethlehem Steel: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial Titan.“

October 2018

Emma Tierney, “Blackguarding: How the Conflict of the ‘Jeering Episode’ Created Compromise for Women Physicians”