Gabor Boritt

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Gabor Boritt
Boritt in 2014
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.boritt.com

Gabor S. Boritt (born 1940 in

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.

Gettysburg College

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]

Modern accomplishments

Boritt served on the boards of the Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation and the

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

• Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (1978) (ASIN B010TTIP5I),[12]
• Changing the Lincoln Image (1985) (with
  Mark E. Neely, Jr.
  ) (ASIN B001Q90WOI)
• Lincoln, The War President: The Gettysburg Lectures (1992) (with
  ISBN 9780195078916
  )
• Why the Confederacy Lost (1992) (ASIN B0099L2F9A)
• Lincoln's Generals (1995) (
  ISBN 978-0195101102
  )
• War Comes Again: Comparative Vistas on the Civil War and World War II (with
  ISBN 978-0195088458
  )
• The Historian's Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History (1996) (
  ISBN 978-0252065446
  )
• The Gettysburg Nobody Knows (1997) (
  ISBN 978-0195102239
  )
• Jefferson Davis's Generals (1999) (
  ISBN 978-0195120622
  )
• The Lincoln Enigma: The Changing Faces of an American Icon (2002) (
  ISBN 978-0195156263
  )
• The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (2005) (
  ISBN 978-0252069840
  )
• The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows (2006) (
  ISBN 978-0743288217
  )
• Slavery, Resistance, Freedom (2009) (
  ISBN 978-0195384604
  )
• The Will of God Prevails: Meditations on God and the Gettysburg Address (2014) (
  ISBN 978-1626207202
  )

• Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College
• Lincoln Prize
• Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
• Gettysburg College

References