Isabel Hull, the John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell, has won the 2005 Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award for "Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany" (Cornell University Press, 2005).

The $2,500 Emerson award is offered by Phi Beta Kappa each year for scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity. The awards ceremony was held Dec. 2 at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.

"Absolute Destruction" is a work of modern European history and a cautionary tale for today, examining the rise and development of German military culture and institutions. Thomas Lacqueur, a judge on the Emerson selection committee, said "The prose is taut; the documentation staggering; the analysis brilliant." Jean Bethke Elshtain, chair of the Emerson committee, said Hull's work is "detailed history of a very high order."

"Absolute Destruction" also received the German Studies Association's DAAD 2005 Book Prize for Outstanding Book in History and Political Science. Hull has taught at Cornell since 1977 and has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among others.

Her 1997 book, "Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815," was honored by the American Historical Association for the most outstanding work in English on any aspect of 17th- and 18th-century European History, and by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (1997) as the best history book that year written by a woman.

Other 2005 Emerson award recipients include Marjorie Garber of Harvard University and Chris Beard from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.