BIOs - 2005 Legacy Lecture Series

Allen C. Guelzo

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He is also Associate Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. He is the author of numerous books on and the Civil War era. His most important work, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Wm. Eerdemans, 1999) won both the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize in 2000. In 2003, his article, “Defending Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and the Conkling Letter, August, 1863,” won Civil War History’s John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article of that year. His most recent work is Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster, 2004). He is now at work on a new book on the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. He is a member of the board of directors of the Abraham Lincoln Association and a member of the advisory council of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. He holds the Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael F. Holt

Michael F. Holt is Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia where he has taught since 1974. He has taught at Yale University and as a visiting professor at Stanford and Cambridge Universities. Holt has written six books and co-edited another. His scholarship has focused on 19th century political history and especially antebellum political history. His books include The Political Crisis of the 1850s (Norton, 1983), Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (LSU Press, 1992) and, with David Herbert Donald and Jean H. Baker, The Civil War and Reconstruction (Norton, 3rd ed., 2001). His Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford, 1999) won second prize in the Lincoln Prize competition for books published that year. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

Gabor S. Boritt

Gabor S. Boritt is Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College. He is Founder and Director of the Civil War Institute at the College, Director of the annual Fortenbaugh Lecture, and Co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Lincoln Prize, the $50,000 annual award for the finest work on the Civil War era. He is author, co-author, and editor of sixteen books on Lincoln and the Civil War, including Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Illinois, 1994). Many of his books have been Book of the Month Club and History Book Club selections. His work has been translated into five languages. He is a member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, the Gettysburg Battlefield Museum Foundation, and Co-Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He was born and raised in Hungary and educated in the U.S. He received his Ph.D. from Boston University.

Phillip Shaw Paludan

Phillip Shaw Paludan is Professor of History and the Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair of Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield. One of the nation’s foremost authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, he joined the faculty of the History program at UIS in 2001.

He received A.B. and M.A. degrees from Occidental College and his doctorate from the University of Illinois where he studied under Harold Hyman and Robert Johannsen. He taught at the University of Kansas for over thirty years, and held visiting appointments at Rutgers University and University College Dublin, Ireland, before being named Distinguished Chair of Lincoln Studies at UIS.

He is the author of four books on the Civil War era, studying constitutional thought of the age, guerrilla warfare, the impact of the war on northern society (A People’s Contest, The Union and Civil War 1861-1865, Harper & Row, 1988), and The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Kansas, 1994). He received the Lincoln Prize for his study of Lincoln's presidency, as well as the Barondess Lincoln Award from the New York City Civil War Round Table. His numerous awards include post doctoral fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Harvard Law School. He has also received a Diploma of Honor from University and an honorary doctorate from Lincoln College.

Professor Paludan is a frequent invited lecturer, speaking in the past year on “Lincoln and Democracy” at the University of Kansas and Ohio Northern University, and on “Lincoln and the Kansas Nebraska Act” at the University of Nebraska.