Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History have announced the finalists for the 2018 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, including On to Petersburg: Grant and Lee, June 4-14, 1864 by Gordon C. Rhea!
Co-founded in 1990 by businessmen and philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize is awarded annually to a work that enhances the general public’s understanding of the Civil War era. According to Gettysburg College, this year’s finalists were recommended to the board from over one hundred book submissions reviewed by a three-person jury: James Oakes, Elizabeth Varon, and Peter Cozzens. The other finalists include:
- Edward Ayers, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (W.W. Norton and Company).
- Ron Chernow, Grant (Penguin Press).
- Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press).
- Cate Lineberry, Be Free or Die (St. Martin’s Press).
- Graham Peck, Making an Antislavery Nation (University of Illinois Press).
- Adam I.P. Smith, The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics: 1846—1865 (University of North Carolina Press).
“We are pleased to see these books—the seven best works of the year on the Civil War period—chosen as finalists for the Lincoln Prize,” said Jim Basker, President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. “The Prize is in its 28th year and any of these outstanding books would make a worthy addition to our distinguished list of past Lincoln laureates.”
The winner of the 2018 Prize will be announced on Monday, February 12th—the 209th anniversary of the famed president’s birthday. All of the finalists will be invited to an event in April hosted at the Union League Club in New York City, where the winner will be recognized and awarded a $50,000 prize and a bronze replica of Augusts Saint-Gauden’s life-size bust “Lincoln the Man.”
Please join us in congratulating Gordon Rhea and wishing him the best of luck, as the judges and the board deliberate their final decision. If you are interested in reading more about Rhea’s Overland Campaign series, check out this interview he did recently with John Banks and buy On to Petersburg today!
