Professor, Historian Win Lincoln Book Prize
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Two books devoted to the lives of 19th-century American leaders share this year’s prestigious Lincoln Book 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 St. Gaudens’ 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.
