This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Gabor Boritt | |
---|---|
Born | 1940 (age 83–84) Budapest, Hungary |
Children | 3, including Jake |
Awards | National Humanities Medal |
Academic background | |
Education | Yankton College University of South Dakota Boston University |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Historian |
Sub-discipline | American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln specialist |
Institutions | Gettysburg College University of Michigan |
Website | www |
Gabor S. Boritt (born 1940 in Budapest,Hungary) is an American historian. He was the Robert Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Born and raised in Hungary,he participated as a teenager in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet Union before escaping to America,where he received his higher education and became a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War. He is the author,co-author,or editor of 16 books about Lincoln or the War. Boritt received the National Humanities Medal in 2008 from President George W. Bush.
Boritt was born to a Jewish family in Budapest,Hungary at the start of World War II. The Nazis forced his family to live in a single room in a hospital on the ghetto's edge,where he played on bloodstained floors. As his father helped lead resistance against the Nazis,his grandfather's family was deported from the countryside and murdered in Auschwitz. By the end of the war,Budapest was in ruins and Hungary in Stalin's grip. In the years that followed,Boritt's mother died,his father and brother were imprisoned,and he was sent to an orphanage. In 1956 sixteen-year-old Boritt joined the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He remembers the initial euphoria:"We thought it was a whole new world. Anything was possible." Days later,3,000 Soviet tanks crushed those possibilities,and Boritt and his sister Judith headed for the Austrian border. In darkness,they hiked through wooded hills before coming to a no man's land guarded by men in watchtowers with machine guns. Freedom lay on the other side. Together,they started running.
After months at an Austrian refugee camp,Boritt came to the U.S. with just one dollar in his pocket,arriving in the "dirtiest city" he had ever seen:New York City. Told that the real America is "out west," Boritt headed to South Dakota. [1] Wanting to learn English,he picked up a free booklet of Abraham Lincoln's writings. Captivated by Lincoln's mastery of the language and his rise from poverty to the presidency,Boritt began studying American history and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yankton College in 1962 and a master's degree from the University of South Dakota in 1963,followed by a Ph.D. from Boston University in 1968.
As an immigrant,he felt obliged to go to Vietnam,where he taught soldiers about the American Civil War. In 1978 after deciding to pursue the study of Lincoln from the economic angle,he published his first book Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream,which placed what Boritt called "the right to rise" at the center of Lincoln's outlook. [1] One of a handful of books on Lincoln published in the 1970s,a 1995 survey of leading experts by Civil War Times lists it as one of the 10 most important books ever written about Lincoln.
After teaching at the University of Michigan,in 1981 Boritt came to Gettysburg College,founding the Civil War Institute,where the school created for him the nation's first fully funded chair for the study of the Civil War. [2] He helped create the $50,000 Lincoln Prize,widely considered the most coveted award for the study of American history. [3] He also helped create the Gilder Lehrman Institute,which is focused on improving the teaching of history in schools. [4]
Boritt served on the boards of the Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission,appointed by Congress. His book The Gettysburg Gospel:The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows (2006) was featured on the cover of U.S. News &World Report and called "fascinating" by The New York Times. [5] In September 2008 Boritt gave a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield to President George W. Bush,Laura Bush,and a group including White House Advisor Karl Rove,former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez,and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. [6]
On November 17,2008,President George W. Bush awarded Boritt the National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities "for a distinguished career of scholarship on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era. His life's work and his life's story stand as testaments to our nation's precious legacy of liberty". [7] His life story is the subject of a feature-length documentary film titled Budapest to Gettysburg (2007),directed by his son Jake Boritt. [8] In 2009 he retired. [9]
Gabor Boritt was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the state's highest honor) by the governor of Illinois in 2009 as a Bicentennial Laureate. [10] In 1996,Boritt received The Lincoln Forum's Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement. [11]
Boritt and his wife Liz live in an 18th-century farmhouse on the edge of the Gettysburg battlefield,which they restored with their own hands. It served as both a stop on the Underground Railroad and as a Confederate hospital. Together they have raised three sons:Beowulf Boritt is a set designer (and streaming video ad star) in New York City,Jake Boritt is a filmmaker who lives in Harlem,and Daniel Boritt is a biologist specializing in birds who lives in Indianapolis,Indiana.
The Gettysburg Address is a speech that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, now known as Gettysburg National Cemetery, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated Confederate forces in the Battle of Gettysburg, the Civil War's deadliest battle. The speech is widely considered one of the most notable and famous delivered in American history.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History was founded in New York City by businessmen-philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman in 1994 to promote the study and interest in American history.
Lewis E. "Lew" Lehrman is an American investment banker, businessman, politician, economist, and historian who supports the ongoing study of American history based on original source documents. He was presented the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2005 for his contributions to American history, the study of President Abraham Lincoln, and monetary policy. In 1982, Lehrman ran for Governor of New York against Democratic candidate Mario Cuomo, ultimately losing the election by two percentage points.
The Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, founded by the late Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman in partnership with Gabor Boritt, Director Emeritus of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, is administered by the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History. It has been awarded annually since 1991 for "the finest scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or the American Civil War era."
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Allen Carl Guelzo is an American historian who serves as the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He formerly was a professor of History at Gettysburg College.
Douglas L. Wilson is the George A. Lawrence Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he taught from 1961 to 1994. He then was the founding director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello) in Charlottesville, Virginia. In his retirement, he returned to Knox College to found and co-direct the Lincoln Studies Center with his colleague Rodney O. Davis.
The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC) was the congressionally created, 14-member federal commission focused on planning and commemorating the 200th birthday of the United States' 16th president on February 12, 2009. The commission served for ten years, from 2000 to 2010. Its official successor organization, announced in 2011 with an expanded board and broadened mission, is the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation.
Edward Lynn "Ed" Ayers is an American historian, professor, administrator, and university president. In July 2013, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony for Ayers's commitment "to making our history as widely available and accessible as possible." He served as the president of the Organization of American Historians in 2017–18.
The Civil War Institute (CWI) at Gettysburg College is a non-profit organization (due to being a part of Gettysburg College and is not a separate legal entity) created to promote the study of the American Civil War Era. The CWI was founded in 1982 by historian and Gettysburg College professor Gabor Boritt, an Abraham Lincoln and American Civil War scholar. The current director is Peter S. Carmichael. The Institute helps coordinate a number of Civil War-related events for the public, including the Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture, an annual program designed to commemorate Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, as well as a week-long summer conference that hosts 400 participants annually. The CWI also supports student learning at Gettysburg College, offering several programs throughout the year to help students hone their skills as young historians.
George C. Rable is an American historian and author. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama. He received the Lincoln Prize in 2003 for his 2002 book Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!
Harold Holzer is a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the American Civil War Era. He serves as director of Hunter College's Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. Holzer previously spent twenty-three years as senior vice president for external affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before retiring in 2015.
William Henry Johnson was a free African American and a sometime personal valet of Abraham Lincoln. Having first worked for Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, Johnson accompanied the President-Elect to Washington, D.C. for his first inauguration (1861).
This bibliography of Abraham Lincoln is a comprehensive list of written and published works about or by Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States. In terms of primary sources containing Lincoln's letters and writings, scholars rely on The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy Basler, and others. It only includes writings by Lincoln, and omits incoming correspondence. In the six decades since Basler completed his work, some new documents written by Lincoln have been discovered. Previously, a project was underway at the Papers of Abraham Lincoln to provide "a freely accessible comprehensive electronic edition of documents written by and to Abraham Lincoln". The Papers of Abraham Lincoln completed Series I of their project The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln in 2000. They electronically launched The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln, Second Edition in 2009, and published a selective print edition of this series. Attempts are still being made to transcribe documents for Series II and Series III.
Michael A. Burlingame is an American historian noted for his works on Abraham Lincoln. He is the Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. Burlingame has written or edited twenty books about Lincoln.
Robert Vance Bruce was an American historian specializing in the American Civil War, who won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876 (1987). After serving in the Army during World War II, Bruce graduated from the University of New Hampshire, where he earned his Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. He received his Master of Arts in history and his Doctor of Philosophy from Boston University, where he was later a professor. He also taught at the University of Bridgeport, Lawrence Academy at Groton, and the University of Wisconsin. Bruce was also a lecturer at the Fortenbaugh Lecture at Gettysburg College.
Jake Boritt is an American documentary filmmaker and producer.
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years encompasses volumes three through six of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln; these volumes focus particularly on the American Civil War period. The first two volumes, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, were published in 1926 and cover the period from Lincoln's birth through his inauguration as president. The final four volumes were published together in 1939, and won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Abraham Lincoln:
This article documents the political career of Abraham Lincoln from the end of his term in the United States House of Representatives in March 1849 to the beginning of his first term as President of the United States in March 1861.
This article is partly based on the documentary film, Budapest to Gettysburg.