The George C. Marshall Papers book series received two national editing awards recently including one for Volume 6, edited by Mark Stoler, professor emeritus of history.

Vol. 6: The Papers of George Catlett Marshall: The Whole World Hangs in the Balance (John Hopkins University Press) won the 2013 Arthur S. Link-Warren F. Kuehl Prize for Documentary Editing from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The definitive text chronicling the papers of George C. Marshall, U.S. secretary of state from 1947-49, was published in January 2013 and includes telegrams, letters, memorandums, speeches and testimony written during Marshall’s tenure as secretary of state in the late 1940s.

The Link-Kuehl Prize is awarded for outstanding collections of primary source materials in the fields of international or diplomatic history, especially those distinguished by the inclusion of commentary designed to interpret the documents and set them within their historical context. Published works as well as electronic collections and audio-visual compilations are eligible.

The entire six-volume George C. Marshall Papers project (Stoler is currently working on the 7th and final volume) also won the 2013 Lyman H. Butterfield Award of the Association for Documentary Editing. The award has been presented annually since 1985 to an individual, project, or institution for recent contributions in the areas of documentary publication, teaching and service.

Stoler’s hiring by the George C. Marshall Foundation in 2008 as editor of the Marshall Papers was apropos considering he’d be continuing the work his graduate school classmate, Larry Bland, who had served as editor of the first five volumes and part of the sixth before his death in 2007. 

“I consider both of these awards a tribute to my late predecessor Larry Bland since one honored the entire project and series of volumes he edited, and the other, the sixth and most recent volume, a good portion of which he had drafted before his untimely death,” said Stoler, a highly distinguished military and diplomatic historian. “I am honored to have been asked to complete his work, and to have succeeded with volume six. Hopefully that will be the case for the seventh and final volume as well.”