(Gettysburg,
PA, February 12, 2007)—Historian Douglas L. Wilson
today was awarded his second Lincoln Prize—becoming
only the second repeat winner in the 17-year-history of
the nation’s most generous and prestigious award
in the field of American history. Wilson, who serves as
co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College
in Galesburg, Illinois, won for his book Lincoln’s
Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (Alfred
A. Knopf). He will receive a $50,000 cash award along
with a bronze cast of Augustus St. Gaudens’ larger-than-life
portrait sculpture of Abraham Lincoln. Professor Wilson
previously won the Lincoln Prize in 1999 for Honor’s
Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln.
Announcement of the Lincoln Prize winner for the year’s
best book on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War was made
today by the Lincoln & Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg
College, which administers the annual awards. The $50,000
prize was co-founded and endowed by business leaders and
philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, the
founders of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
The Institute devotes itself to education by supporting
magnet schools, teacher education, curriculum development,
exhibitions, and publications, as well as endowing several
major history awards. Mr. Gilder and Mr. Lehrman established
the prize in 1990, together with Professor Gabor Boritt,
Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.
In addition to the winner, the Lincoln Prize acknowledged
two finalists for special mention in 2007: Martha Hodes,
professor of history at New York University, for The
Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race,
and War in the Nineteenth Century (W. W. Norton
& Co.); and Harry S. Stout, the Jonathan Edwards
Professor of American Religious History at Yale University,
for Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History
of the Civil War (Viking).
The three-member Lincoln Prize jury— Professor
Jean H. Baker of Goucher College (chair); Professor
John Y. Simon of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale,
winner of a Lincoln Prize special achievement honor
in 2004; and Margaret Creighton of Bates College—a
finalist for last year’s Lincoln Prize for The
Color of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History,
Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil
War’s Defining Battle (Basic Books)—considered
119 submissions for the 2007 award before recommending
its choice to the Lincoln Prize board, which makes the
final decision.
In its evaluation of Douglas Wilson’s Lincoln’s
Sword, the jury said: “Others have discussed
the power of Lincoln’s words, but Wilson is a
pioneer in analysis of the composition process. In this
endeavor, he has penetrated a subtle mind never before
investigated with such depth and skill. He exhibits
Lincoln as a literary craftsman, aware of the power
of words and determined to give them expression in the
most meaningful fashion. Lincoln’s Sword
is no ordinary book, but one that will take its place
on every shelf devoted to Lincoln’s achievement
in welding together a nation.”
The only previous two-time Lincoln Prize laureate
is Allen C. Guelzo, now of Gettysburg College, who won
in 2005 for Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,
and in 2000 for Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.
For more information on the Lincoln Prize, visit:
http://www.gettysburg.edu/civilwar/prizes_andscholarships/
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