Authors to share Lincoln award

Two books offering fresh and provocative insights into the lives of three of the Civil War era’s most compelling figures — Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Robert E. Lee — will share the 2008 Lincoln Prize, the most generous and prestigious award in the field of American history.

The winners of this year’s prize are James Oakes of the City University of New York for “The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics” (W.W. Norton) and Elizabeth Brown Pryor for “Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters” (Viking).

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