Each author will receive a $20,000 cash award along with a bronze cast of Augustus St. Gaudens’ larger-than-life portrait sculpture of Abraham Lincoln. Honorable mention and a $10,000 prize will go to Chandra Manning of Georgetown University for the book What this Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf).

Announcement of the Lincoln Prize winners for the year’s best books on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War was made by the Lincoln & Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College, which administers the yearly awards. The $50,000 annual prize was co-founded and endowed by business leaders and philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, the principals of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York. 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 Lincoln Prize in 1990, together with Professor Gabor Boritt, Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Since founding the Lincoln Prize in 1990, Mr. Gilder and Mr. Lehrman have bestowed nearly $1 million on the annual winners, including special prizes.

Commented Mr. Gilder and Mr. Lehrman on the naming of this year’s prize-winning books: “It is a rare moment in American history when three such iconic figures are illuminated in studies of such power and originality. With the works for which we honor them, James Oakes and Elizabeth Brown Pryor have made major contributions to our understanding of leaders who—by their writing, political leadership, and military genius, and by either their capacity for, or resistance to, change—altered the way America regards both itself and its people. We are proud to recognize and celebrate these superb literary and historical achievements.”

Commenting further on the award winners, Professor Gabor Boritt said: “So much has been written about Lincoln, Lee, and Douglass that it is difficult to imagine the appearance of new contributions of unmistakable significance—much less the arrival of two such signal achievements in a single year. Moreover, these works possess not only originality of thought and depth of research, but elegance of writing. The fine books by Oakes and Pyror have made a significant impact on the field—as has Chandra Manning’s stunning examination of Civil War soldiers’ attitudes toward slavery and emancipation—and they all richly deserve the honors they have earned.”

James Oakes is Graduate School Humanities Professor in the history department at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His previous books include The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders and Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and has written many scholarly articles, encyclopedia entries, and book chapters. The Lincoln Prize jury commended Professor Oakes for using “with great effectiveness a “new comparative framework to analyze the careers of the wartime President and the nation’s most important black leader.” The jury particularly cited the author’s “powerful” narrative, “designed for historians as well as general readers,” which “flows seamlessly…sometimes with dramatic effect.”

Elizabeth Brown Pryor, whose acclaimed previous book was Clara Barton, Professional Angel, has enjoyed distinguished careers as both a historian and as a senior diplomat in the American Foreign Service, most recently working as a senior advisor to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe of the United States Congress. Commending the Pryor book for “tackling a familiar subject in an unconventional way,” the jury praised its “stunning” writing and “brilliant” analysis, adding: “The book captures Lee’s central importance and the far-reaching impact of his decisions in a way that no other scholar has accomplished.”

Chandra Manning, who has taught at Harvard and Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, is currently assistant professor of history at Georgetown University. What this Cruel War Was Over is her first book. Calling it “an excellent book on an important subject” and “a signal contribution to Civil War literature, the jury called Manning’s “a book of remarkably broad scope—broader than the title suggests—that shows that slavery was not only central to understanding the causes and consequences of the Civil War but is equally vital to understanding why and how the soldiers fought.”

The three-member 2008 Lincoln Prize jury— George C. Rable, the Charles Summersell Chair in Southern History, University of Alabama (jury chair and 2003 winner of the Lincoln Prize); Loren Schweninger, the Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor and director of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and co-winner of the 2000 Lincoln Prize; and Elizabeth Leonard, the John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Professor of History, and Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Colby College in Maine—considered 120 submissions for the 2008 award before recommending the finalists to the Lincoln Prize board, which makes the final decision.

The Lincoln Prize will be formally awarded at a dinner at the Yale Club in New York on Tuesday, April 1.

For more information on the Lincoln Prize, visit:
http://www.gettysburg.edu/civilwar/prizes_andscholarships/

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