Lincoln-Douglass book wins Lincoln prize
NEW YORK (AP) — A biography of Gen. Robert E. Lee and a book about the relationship between President Lincoln and abolitionist Frederick Douglass were this year’s winners of the Lincoln Prize for Civil War scholarship.
James Oakes, author of The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, and Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who wrote Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, each will receive $20,000.
‘‘James Oakes and Elizabeth Brown Pryor have made major contributions to our understanding of leaders who — by their writing, political leadership, and military genius, and by either their capacity for, or resistance to, change — altered the way America regards both itself and its people,’’ Lincoln Prize founders Richard Gilman and Lewis Lehrman said in a statement Tuesday, Lincoln’s 199th birthday.
Previous winners of the award, founded in 1990, include Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln.
