The Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (the Knights Templar) has announced that it will award the Military Order of Saint Louis to Alex Storozynski for The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and The Age of Revolution.

Brigadier General John T. Digilio, Jr., Chancellor of the Templar Priory of Saint Patrick in the Hudson Valley of New York , said: “It is the purpose of the revived Military Order of Saint Louis in the United States to annually recognize an author either for an individual work of military and/or naval history or literature, or for a body of such work.”

 “In this quadricentennial of the Hudson River, the author whose outstanding work of military history stood out above all others - in a field noteworthy for its excellence, was Alex Storozynski’s The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution, about the Polish engineer who, on his own initiative, bound his fate with that of the cause of American Liberty, and who is responsible for the fortification of West Point, key to the strategic Hudson River.”

 The Peasant Prince outlines Kosciuszko’s pivotal role in the American Revolution, his efforts to spread that democratic revolution to Europe. In addition to fighting to overthrow the British monarchy in the United States, Kosciuszko championed the rights of black slaves in America, white serfs in feudalistic Europe, Jews, women, Native Americans and all people who were disenfranchised. His motto was, “For your freedom and ours.”

Previous recipients of the revived Military Order of Saint Louis include:

James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

Thomas Fleming, The Duel and other works

Philip Caputo, Rumor of War

Colonel David Fitz Enz, Why a Soldier and The Final Invasion

Colonel Charles Waterhouse, Marines and Others and Delta to DMZ

Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide * Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction

Don Troiani, Don Troiani’s Civil War

Colonel John Grider Miller, The Bridge at Dong Ha * General Wallace M. Greene, Jr. Book Award from the Marine Corps Historical Foundation

Jason Conroy, Heavy Metal: A Tank Company’s Battle to Baghdad

Major Seán Michael Flynn, The Fighting 69th: One Remarkable National Guard Unit’s Journey from Ground Zero to Baghdad

The presentation will be conducted on Oct. 15 in Chappaqua, NewYork at Crabtree’s Kittle House, 11 Kittle Road.

For Reservations, call (914) 941-2118. 

http://www.smotj.org/

http://www.smotj-stp.org/

LIST OF AWARDS

The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution, By Alex Storozynski, continues to win prizes for its contribution to the understanding of American and European History.

On Oct. 15, 2009, this biography of Kosciuszko has won the Templar Military History Award, the “Military Order of Saint Louis.”

In Warsaw, on Nov. 22, 2009, Poland’s Foreign Minister, Radek Sikorski, awarded Alex Storozynski, author of The Peasant Prince with the “Ministry of Foreign Affair’s Laureate Diploma” for outstanding merit in promoting Polish Culture throughout the world.

At its annual meeting in San Diego, on Jan. 9, 2010, The Polish American Historical Association, an affiliate of the American Historical Association, awarded the “Oskar Halecki Prize” to The Peasant Prince as “an important monograph that has contributed to the Polish experience in the United States.”

And on Feb. 2, 2010, Storozynski will be awarded “The Tadeusz Walendowski Prize” from the Polish Library in Washington D.C. Walendowski was a journalist, filmmaker and dissident who edited the underground magazine “Pulse” during the communist era in Poland. He later settled in the United States and worked for the Voice of America, and co-founded the Polish Library in Washington D.C.