The National Humanities Medal is an American award that annually recognizes several individuals, groups, or institutions for work that has "deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens' engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans' access to important resources in the humanities."
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.
The Organization of American Historians (OAH), formerly known as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, is the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history. OAH's members in the U.S. and abroad include college and university professors; historians, students; precollegiate teachers; archivists, museum curators, and other public historians; and a variety of scholars employed in government and the private sector. The OAH publishes the Journal of American History. Among its various programs, OAH conducts an annual conference each spring, and has a robust speaker bureau—the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program.
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, 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.
The George Washington Book Prize was instituted in 2005 and is awarded annually to the best book on the founding era of the United States; especially ones that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history. It is administered by Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience; it is sponsored by Washington College in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington's Mount Vernon. At $50,000, the George Washington Book Prize is one of the largest book awards in the United States.
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Hollis Micheal Tarver Denova is an author, historian, and retired university professor, with a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Bowling Green State University. Tarver is the son of Rosemary Tarver and Cecil Donald Tarver, Sr..
Gabor S. Boritt 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.
Allen Carl Guelzo is an American historian who serves as Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities 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.
Abner Linwood Holton III, known as Woody Holton, is an American professor who is the McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina.
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!
Philip D. Morgan is a British historian. He has specialized in Early Modern colonial British America and slavery in the Americas. In 1999, he won both the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize for his book Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998).
The Friend of History Award is an award given by the Organization of American Historians (OAH). The award was first presented in 2005. It is not a monetary award and is granted annually.
Kenneth W. Noe is an American historian whose primary interests are the American Civil War, Appalachia and the American South. He has most recently published The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War.
John Kuo Wei Tchen, also known as Jack, is a historian of Chinese American history and the Inaugural Clement A. Price Chair in Public History and Humanities at Rutgers University.
Elizabeth D. Leonard is an American historian and the John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Professor of History at Colby College in Maine. Her areas of specialty include American women and the Civil War era.
Peter Cozzens is an American historian and retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer. He has written and/or edited over seventeen books on the American Civil War and the American Indian Wars.
