Founders and Co-chairmen
Richard Gilder, co-founder of the Gilder
Lehrman Institute of American History, heads the brokerage
firm Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co. He is Chairman of the Executive
Committee at the New-York Historical Society and serves on
the Executive Board of the Omohundro Institute of Early American
History and Culture. He is a trustee of the Morgan Library
& Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the
Central Park Conservancy, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
In 2005, Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman received the National
Humanities Medal for their work promoting the study and love
of American history.
Lewis E. Lehrman is co-founder of the
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and a Trustee
of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Abolition and
Slavery at Yale University. He is Chairman of L.E. Lehrman
& Co., a Greenwich-based investment partnership. He was
the 1982 Republican and Conservative parties' gubernatorial
candidate in New York, and later a Managing Director at Morgan
Stanley. He is a Trustee of the New-York Historical Society.
He received his Bachelor of Arts degree at Yale University
in 1960, after which he won a Carnegie Teaching Fellowship
as an instructor of history on the Yale faculty. Subsequently,
he received his master's degree as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow
from Harvard University. He is the author of Lincoln at
Peoria (2008), and his articles on Abraham Lincoln have
appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Greenwich
Time and other periodicals. He has been awarded Honorary
Degrees from Babson College (Babson Park, MA), Gettysburg
College (Gettysburg, PA), Marymount University (Arlington,
VA), Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, CA) and Lincoln
College (Lincoln, IL). In 2005, he was awarded the National
Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in an Oval Office
ceremony.
Advisory Board
Joyce Oldham Appleby, Professor of
History Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles,
is past president both of the American Historical Association
and the Organization of American Historians. She co-directs
the History News Service, a volunteer syndicate of historians
writing newspaper op-ed essays that put contemporary issues
into historical perspective. Her books include Economic
Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England; Capitalism
and a New Social Order; Liberalism and Republicanism
in the Historical Imagination; Inheriting the Revolution:
The First Generation of Americans; and most recently,
Thomas Jefferson (The American Presidents Series).
Edward L. Ayers is President of the
University of Richmond. His books include Promise of the
New South: Life after Reconstruction, a finalist for
both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and In
the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America,
1859-1863, which won the Bancroft Prize and the Albert
J. Beveridge Prize. A pioneer in digital history, Ayers was
a co-recipient of the first Lincoln Prize from the Gilder
Lehrman Institute and Gettysburg College in 2001.
William F. Baker is CEO Emeritus of
the Educational Broadcasting Corporation. Among his honors
in public television are four Emmy Awards as a producer, two
DuPont Columbia Journalism Awards, and the Trustees Emmy Award
of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He
is the author of Down the Tube: An Inside Account of the
Failure of American Television. He is a director of the
Public Broadcasting Service, Rodale Press, Consumer Union,
and is on the advisory board of the National Park System,
among other organizations.
Thomas Bender is University Professor
of the Humanities at New York University. He is author of
New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New
York from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time; Rethinking
American History in a Global Age; The Unfinished City:
New York and the Metropolitan Idea; and A Nation Among
Nations: America's Place in World History.
Carol Berkin is Presidential Professor
of History at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, City
University of New York. She is the author of several books
including Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Conservative;
First Generations: Women in Colonial America; A
Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution;
and Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's
Independence. She is the editor of History Now,
the Gilder Lehrman Institute's quarterly online journal.
Judith Roth Berkowitz is a Chairperson
at the Center for Education Innovation – Public Education
Association. She is Chairperson and Trustee of the University
of Pennsylvania, her alma mater. She is also a Trustee at
the New-York Historical Society, Rockefeller Foundation and
various other cultural and educational institutions.
Ira Berlin, Distinguished University
Professor in the Department of History at the University of
Maryland, has written extensively on Southern and Afro-American
history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is
founder and former director of the Freedmen and Southern Society
Project, and a past president of the Organization of American
Historians. He is author of Free at Last: A Documentary
History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War and Generations
of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.
Lewis W. Bernard is Chairman and founder
of Classroom, Inc., which uses computer-based simulations
of real-life experiences in schools and community-based organizations.
He is the former Chief Administrative and Financial Officer
of Morgan Stanley & Co. He is Chairman of the board of the
American Museum of Natural History and serves on the boards
of the J. Paul Getty Trust, the John and Mary Markle Foundation,
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Marsh and McLennan
Companies.
Victoria Bjorklund is a Partner at
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP where she heads the firm's
Exempt Organizations Group, which advises public charities,
private foundations, and donors. In 2004-2005, she served
as member and chair of the IRS's Tax Exempt/Government Entities
Advisory Committee. In June 2005, she received the IRS Tax
Exempt Division Commissioner's Award for "ground-breaking
service" to the Advisory Committee. Since 1988 she has
served as pro bono counsel for both Doctors Without Borders
(recipient of the 1998 Nobel Peace prize) and the Robin Hood
Foundation. She is the co-author with Jim Fishman and Dan
Kurtz of New York Nonprofit Law and Practice.
David W. Blight, Class of '54 Professor
of American History at Yale University, is the author of Race
and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, for which
he won the 2001 Frederick Douglass Prize and the 2002 Bancroft
and Lincoln Prizes. His other books include Beyond the
Battlefield: Race, Memory and the Civil War; Frederick
Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee; and the
edited volumes When this Cruel War is Over: The Civil War
Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster; Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass; and The Souls of Black
Folk, by W.E.B. DuBois. He is also Director of the Gilder
Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
at Yale University.
Gabor S. Boritt, (co-chairman, advisory
board) Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and
Director, Emeritus, of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg
College, serves on the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Among
his publications are Lincoln and the Economics of the American
Dream; Why the Confederacy Lost; Lincoln's Generals;
Why the Civil War Came; The Gettysburg Nobody Knows;
The Lincoln Enigma; and The Gettysburg Gospel:
The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows.
Richard Brookhiser is Senior Editor
at National Review. His books include Founding Father:
Rediscovering George Washington; Alexander Hamilton,
American; America's First Dynasty: The Adamses of Massachusetts;
Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who
Wrote the Constitution; and What Would the Founders
Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers. He wrote and narrated
the film The Character of George Washington, which
aired on PBS in 2002. He was the Historian Curator of the
New-York Historical Society's show, Alexander Hamilton:The
Man Who Made Modern America.
Christopher Leslie Brown is Professor
of History at Columbia University. He specializes in the history
of eighteenth century Britain, the early modern British Empire,
and the comparative history of slavery and abolition. He is
the author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism,
which was awarded the 2007 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
Kenneth L. Burns is producer, director,
co-writer, and cameraman for the nine-part PBS series The
Civil War, which won the 1991 Lincoln Prize, as well
as Jazz, Baseball, and Brooklyn Bridge,
among others. His documentaries have won Emmy Awards, a Peabody
Award, the D.W. Griffith Award, the Erik Barnouw Prize, two
Grammy awards, and earned two Academy Award nominations.
Ric Burns, documentary filmmaker, produced
the award-winning series New York: A Documentary Film,
which aired on PBS. He has produced, written, and directed
many other films for public television, including Coney
Island, The Donner Party, The Way West,
Ansel Adams, and The Civil War, which he
produced with his brother Ken and wrote with Geoffrey C. Ward.
For his films he has received Emmys, a Peabody, a Christopher
Award, and the Alfred I. du Pont-Columbia University Award,
among others.
Andrew Carroll is the founder and Director
of the Legacy Project, a national, all-volunteer initiative
that encourages Americans to seek and preserve wartime correspondence.
Since 1998, the Legacy Project has received more than 75,000
previously-unpublished letters from every conflict in U.S.
history. He has edited the national bestsellers Letters
of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters
and War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American
Wars, as well as Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan,
and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their
Families.
David Brion Davis (co-chairman, advisory
board) is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University
and Director Emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the
Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
Among his many books are The Problem of Slavery in Western
Culture; The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution,
1770-1823; Slavery and Human Progress; The Boisterous
Sea of Liberty (with Steven Mintz); In the Image of
God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery;
Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery; and Inhuman
Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.
His honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize,
the National Book Award for History and Biography, an honorary
degree from Columbia University, and an Award for Scholarly
Distinction from the American Historical Association.
Andrew Delbanco is the author of Melville:
His World and Work, which was a finalist for the Los
Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography. Andrew Delbanco's essays
appear regularly in The New York Review of Books,
The New Republic, and The New York Times Magazine.
In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences and named by Time Magazine as "America's
Best Social Critic." In 2003, he was named New York State
Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities.
A trustee of the American Association of Colleges & Universities,
the Library of America, and the Teagle Foundation, and trustee
emeritus of the National Humanities Center, he is Julian Clarence
Levi Professor Chair in the Humanities at Columbia University,
where he is currently Director of American Studies.
Richard Ekman, President of the Council
of Independent Colleges, previously served as Vice President
for Programs of the Atlantic Philanthropic Service Company
and Secretary of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A former
history professor, college dean, and administrator at the
National Endowment for the Humanities, he serves on several
educational and not-for-profit advisory boards.
Joseph J. Ellis is Ford Foundation
Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author
of several books on American history. He won the Pulitzer
Prize for his book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary
Generation, and the National Book Award for American
Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. His other books
include Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John
Adams and His Excellency: George Washington.
Drew Gilpin Faust is President of Harvard
University. Her books include Mothers of Invention: Women
of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, for
which she won the Francis Parkman Prize; Southern Stories:
Slaveholders in Peace and War; The Creation of Confederate
Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South;
A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the
Old South; and James Henry Hammond and the Old South:
A Design for Mastery.
David Hackett Fischer is University
Professor and Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University.
He is the author of Albion’s Seed, The
Great Wave, Liberty and Freedom, Paul Revere’s
Ride, and Washington’s Crossing, for which
he received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in History.
Seymour Fliegel is President of the
Center for Educational Innovation/Public Education Association
in New York City, where he is the Richard Gilder Senior Fellow.
A former principal and superintendent, his work in East Harlem's
District Four brought national attention to the issue of public
school choice. The history of his impact on the education
system is described in his book Miracle in East Harlem:
The Fight for Choice in Public Education.
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor
of History at Columbia University, is a former president of
the Organization of American Historians and of the American
Historical Association. He won the Bancroft Prize for his
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877.
His other books include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men:
The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War;
America's Black Past: A Reader in Afro American History;
Nat Turner; The Story of American Freedom; and
Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing
World.
Ellen V. Futter has been President
of the American Museum of Natural History since 1993. Before
joining the Museum she served as President of Barnard College
for thirteen years. Committed to public service, Ms. Futter
serves on the boards of several non-profit and for-profit
organizations. She formerly served as Chairman of the Board
of New York Federal Reserve Bank. She is a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations. She has received numerous honorary degrees
and awards.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is Alphonse
Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W.E.B. Du
Bois Institute for African and African American Research at
Harvard University. Among his books are Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Black Man; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory
of Afro-American Literary Criticism; Loose Canons:
Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir;
and America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African
Americans. He is editor of The Norton Anthology of
African American Literature and The Bondwoman's Narrative,
a novel by Hannah Crafts.
S. Parker Gilbert is Chairman Emeritus
of the Morgan Stanley Group. He also serves on the Board of
Trustees at the Morgan Library, the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; and is a director
of the Josiah H. Macy Foundation. Mr. Gilbert also serves
as a director of Bessemer Securities Corporation and Managing
Director of Bessemer Securities LLC; and as a director of
the Taubman Centers, Inc.
Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce
Professor of the Civil War Era and Professor of History at
Gettysburg College. He won the 2000 Lincoln Prize for Abraham
Lincoln: Redeemer President and the annual best-article
prize for 2002 from Civil War History for "Defending
Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and the Conkling Letter, 1863."
He won the 2005 Lincoln Prize for Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America.
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