Historian, Diplomat Win Book Prize

Two books devoted to the lives of 19th-century American leaders share this year's prestigious Lincoln Prize, given annually to outstanding works of scholarship on the Civil War, it was announced yesterday.

The joint winners are James Oakes, a professor at the City University of New York, for "The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics," published by W. W. Norton, and Elizabeth Brown Pryor, a historian and former diplomat, for "Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters," published by Viking. Each will receive a $20,000 award and a bronze cast of Augustus Saint-Gaudens's outsize sculpture of Abraham Lincoln. Honorable mention, and a $10,000 award, will go to a third finalist, Chandra Manning, a professor at Georgetown University, for her "What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War," published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Established in 1990 by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, the Lincoln Prize is administered by the Lincoln & Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College and judged by a three-member jury of Civil War historians.