Significant Contributions Service Award

Created in 2007, the Major General I.B. Holley Award recognizes an individual who has made sustained, significant contributions to the documentation of Air Force and Space Force history during a lifetime of service. The Award’s inaugural presentation was to Major General I.B. Holley as a tribute to his decades of assistance, support, and encouragement to military historians.

Throughout the years, Major General Holley served as a visiting professor at the U.S. Military Academy. He taught many courses on Military History, the History of Technology, and similar subjects at Duke University beginning in 1947. Over the course of six decades, Holley wrote numerous books, scholarly papers, reviews, and critiques and demonstrated professional interests in various historical subjects, including the American Highway Revolution, Air Weapons Development and Acquisition, and Intellectual History.

Holley received the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award in 1989. Well known for his service work, Holley inspired an effort by Duke scholars in 2004 to donate scholarly books, textbooks, and journal articles to Iraqi university and college libraries, which suffered damage in the second Gulf War and previously under Saddam Hussein’s rule.