#98-04-20
For Release: April 15, 1999
Contact: communication@knox.edu
Lincoln Studies Co-Director Douglas Wilson
Wins 1999 Lincoln Prize
Douglas L. Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College,
Galesburg, Illinois, has been awarded the 1999 Lincoln Prize -- the largest
national award in the field of history. The prize, which includes a cash award
of $35,000, was presented Thursday, April 15, in New York City by the Lincoln
and Soldiers Institute of Gettysburg College. Wilson won the award for his
book, Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln. The award is
given annually for outstanding achievement in Lincoln and Civil War studies.
Among prior winners are filmmaker Ken Burns and historians David Herbert Donald
and James M. McPherson.
Wilson's work, which chronicles the start of Lincoln's political career in
Illinois, was praised at the award ceremony as a "groundbreaking study [of] the
future president's turbulent early years."
Although Lincoln is "the most written about of all Americans," Wilson said at
the award ceremony, most historians have neglected Lincoln's pre-presidential
life. Researching Honor's Voice, Wilson said he found that "Lincoln's
legendary transformation from uneducated backwoodsman to successful lawyer and
politician was more trying, more of a struggle, more fraught with difficulty
and even despondency than had been realized."
In addition to the cash prize, Wilson was presented with a bronze bust of
Lincoln based on a famous sculpture by Augustus St. Gaudens. Second prize of
$15,000 was awarded to author J. Tracy Power for Lee's Miserables, a
book about the Confederate Army.
A total of 82 works were submitted to a jury of scholars chaired by historian
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese of Emory University. The jury's recommendations were
presented to the board of trustees of the Lincoln Prize of Gettysburg College,
which rendered the final decision.
Honor's Voice, published by Alfred A. Knopf, also has won the
Achievement Award of the Lincoln Group of New York and the Barondess/Lincoln
Award of the New York Civil War Roundtable.
Wilson, a member of the Knox faculty from 1961 to 1997, is George Appleton
Lawrence Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of English. A noted scholar
of Thomas Jefferson, he is the author of two books about Jefferson, and from
1994 to 1998 he was director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies
at Monticello. He began his examination of Lincoln for a comparative study of
Jefferson and Lincoln as readers -- an article published in 1991 as a cover
story in The Atlantic Monthly.
In 1998 Wilson returned to Knox, where he and colleague Rodney Davis
co-founded the Lincoln Studies Center. They are co-editors of another acclaimed
work about Lincoln, Herndon's Informants: Letters and Interviews about
Abraham Lincoln, which won the 1998 Annual Book Award of the Abraham
Lincoln Institute of the Mid-Atlantic. Their joint research into Lincoln's
pre-presidential years has been featured on The History Channel program
Lincoln: The Untold Stories.
Founded in 1837, Knox is an independent, four-year, liberal arts college,
located in Galesburg, Illinois, with 1,100 students from 42 states and 33
nations. Knox's "Old Main," a National Historic Landmark, is the only building
remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.
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