History is smiling upon Doris Kearns Goodwin. On Saturday, the writer received the 16th annual Lincoln Prize for her book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”

This award, for excellence in the study of American history, was created by philanthropists Lewis Lehrman and Richard Gilder, an investor in this newspaper. Each year the $50,000 prize is awarded by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College.

In her remarks, Ms. Goodwin described her early interest in history.”For as long as I remember, I have loved history and I loved hearing stories of the past,” she said.

She said she believes this passion goes back to two experiences in her childhood. First, her mother, whose bout with rheumatic fever as a child left her weak as an adult,barely the left the house.The young Doris listened closely to her mother’s stories: “I somehow became obsessed with the idea that if I could keep her talking about the days when she was young and healthy, her mind would control her body and the premature aging process we were all witnessing would be stopped in its tracks.”

A second formative experience was her father’s passion for baseball. When she was 6, he taught her the art of keeping score while listening to baseball games on the radio. When he would return from work, at first she would blurt out who won and lost. But she quickly learned that in order to hold her father’s attention, she’d have to tell the story from beginning to end.

Later in life,she read an essay by Barbara Tuchman that said that even if one is writing about war as a narrative historian, “You have to somehow imagine to yourself you do not know how that war ended,so one can carry the reader every step along the way.”

Ms. Goodwin studied government, when her mentor was Richard Neustadt, and she went on to write biographies of presidents. She joked about a recurring nightmare: In the afterlife, she faces a panel of presidents whose lives she has written about, and each tells her what she got wrong. The audience laughed when she said President Johnson would ask why her book on Kennedy was twice as long as her book about him.

How far did Lincoln’s fame reach? Ms. Goodwin told of a remarkable interview with Leo Tolstoy printed in the New York World in 1908. He talked about journeying to the remote Caucuses and meeting inhabitants who asked for stories about the great figures of the West. Tolstoy regaled them with accounts of Napoleon and Alexander the Great, among others. “Wait,” they said, tell us of the greatest of all, “tell us of Lincoln.”

Ms. Goodwin said, “Tolstoy was stunned that they had heard of Lincoln.” He told them everything he knew, including Lincoln’s childhood and the Emancipation Proclamation.

The crowd at the award ceremony could probably rattle off those details, too – and then some. Gettysburg president Katherine Haley Will welcomed the audience. Also participating was Civil War Institute chairman Gabor Boritt, whose next book is “The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows” (Simon & Schuster).

Three authors won honorable mention for the prize: Carol Bundy for “The Nature of Sacrifice,” Margaret Creighton for “The Colors of Courage,” and Richard Miller for “Harvard’sCivil War.”

Attending the party were the National Endowment for the Humanities chairman, Bruce Cole; Princeton historian James McPherson, who is writing a book about Lincoln as commander in chief; the author of the forthcoming “Lincoln’s Secession Winter” Harold Holzer, who will co-chair the New York State Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, celebrating 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth in 2009. The U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission’s executive director, Michael Bishop, and commissioner, Jean Bandler, were also present.

The gathering included historian Catherine Clinton, who is writing a book about Mary Lincoln, and co-chair of the New-York Historical Society, Nancy Newcomb, as well as a former winner of the Lincoln Prize, Richard Carwardine.

Also seen was the president of the Lincoln Group of New York, Joseph Guerrera, and James Swanson, who wrote “Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer.” Nearby were a University of Illinois at Springfield professor Philip Paludan; historian Paul Tonks; and Frank Milligan, who is director of Lincoln Cottage, the 16th president’s seasonal retreat outside Washington.

gshapiro@nysun.com