Historian and professor Allen C. Guelzo is the winner of the inaugural Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, which carries a purse of $50,000. Guelzo won the prize for his book GETTYSBURG: The Last Invasion which was released in hardcover by A.A. Knopf in 2013, and in paperback by Vintage last month. His selection was announced last night in a ceremony at the New-York Historical Society.
"Guelzo's book exemplifies the qualities the judging panel was seeking in a winning title for the prize," said the chairman of the judging committee, Dr. Andrew Roberts. "GETTYSBURG will stand out as a lasting and important work in the military history genre."
Over 100 titles were submitted by publishers in the United States and the United Kingdom for the prize, which was established jointly this year by the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation and Lewis E. Lehrman, co-founder of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, author, and champion of studies in American political and military history.
The Foundation, established by Harry Guggenheim in 1929 to study the predisposing qualities that lead humankind to commit acts of "violence, domination and aggression," has always numbered the history of warfare among its primary research interests.
"Our purpose in establishing this annual prize is to restore the serious pursuit of military history in research, scholarship, and writing–in recent times ignored by the American academic community–to its traditional role as a staple of historical study," said Josiah Bunting III, president of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and national chairman of the English Speaking Union.
Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, both winners of the Lincoln Prize. Guelzo's essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in publications ranging from the American Historical Review and Wilson Quarterly to newspapers such as The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Paoli and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
The other five books on the 2013 shortlist for the prize were:
— The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt & Co.)
— Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory, 1793-1815 by Roger Knight (Allen Lane/Penguin Books)
— Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War by Peter R. Mansoor (Yale University Press)
— The Men Who Lost America by Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy (Yale University Press)
— The Bombing War: Europe, 1939-1945 by Richard Overy (Allen Lane/Penguin Books)
The Prize will be awarded annually in recognition of the best book in the field of military history published in English during the previous calendar year.
