Doris Kearns Goodwin has won the 16th annual Lincoln Prize for her book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.” A prize of $50,000, awarded by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College and endowed by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, along with a replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bust of Lincoln, will be presented to Ms. Goodwin at a ceremony on April 6 at the Union League Club in New York City.

In an announcement of the award, which is the largest in the field of American history, Mr. Gilder and Mr. Lehrman, who are the co-founders of the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, described Ms. Goodwin’s work as “the product of exhaustive research, original interpretation, and deep insights into the period.” Their statement continued: “The book is further blessed by its author’s bold narrative style: dramatic, evocative, and deeply moving. This is a once-in-a-generation scholarly achievement that has drawn hundreds of thousands of new readers into history’s greatest story.”

Three other books won honorable mention: “The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-1864” by Carol Bundy, “The Color of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History — Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War’s Defining Battle” by Margaret Creighton, and “Harvard’s Civil War: A History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry” by Richard F. Miller. Each of the honorable mention winners will be awarded $5,000.