Prof. David Hackett Fischer (HIST) won the Pulitzer Prize for history yesterday for Washington's Crossing, his 2004 volume about George Washington's maneuver across the Delaware River on Christmas night of 1776."I was surprised and delighted," Fischer said of the $10,000 award. Speaking by telephone from his home in Wayland, the professor told the Justice Monday night that he "never expected to win."

University administrators, on the other hand, suggested they thought otherwise.

Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe said Fischer's prize is "well-earned." University President Jehuda Reinharz concurred, but with even more enthusiasm.

"This is really well-deserved and long-coming," Reinharz said. "We're really proud of him. Each one of his books deserved the Pulitzer."

Reinharz said that when he called Fischer to congratulate him, the history professor was at work on his next book, a tome about Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer and founder of Quebec City.

Washington's Crossing had already been widely laurelled by book critics before its Pulitzer win. A finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, it was featured by the book reviews of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe as one of the best works of last year.

The historian Joseph J. Ellis, who published his own biography of George Washington last year, reviewed Washington's Crossing for The New York Times Book Review:

"The Civil War, World War I, World War II and Vietnam have all been captured memorably, but the American Revolution seems to resist cinematic treatment," Ellis wrote. "More than any other book, Washington's Crossing provides the opportunity to correct this strange oversight, for in a confined chronological space we have the makings of both Patton and Saving Private Ryan, starring none other than George Washington. Fischer has provided the script. And it's all true."

Fischer's Pulitzer is not the first for Brandeis' history department. Former professor Leonard W. Levy won the 1969 history prize for his book, Origins of the Fifth Amendment, and Alan Taylor, a history professor at the University of California at Davis who received a Ph.D. from Brandeis in 1986, won the 1994 award for William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, a history of Cooperstown, N.Y.

Washington's Crossing is a volume in a series titled "Pivotal Moments in American History" being published by Oxford University Press. Fischer and Princeton University history professor James M. McPherson are the editors of the series which also includes Crossroads of Freedom, McPherson's history of the Battle of Antietam, and Freedom Riders, an account of the civil rights movement by Raymond O. Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida.

An aim of the "Pivotal Moments" series, Fischer said, is to provide a "third way" of historical scholarship. He called the first way "old political" histories that featured strong narratives. The second way was the "new cultural histories" popular in the 1960s and '70s. Fischer called this style "heavily deterministic." The third way, on the other hand, is a "new idea" featuring a "braided narrative" that borrows from the first two styles but with a different organization.

Washington's Crossing beat two other books for the Pulitzer Prize in history, one of which-Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle of Ohio State University-won the 2004 National Book Award for nonfiction.