Gabor Boritt

Author Event: Gabor Boritt
January 24, 2007

The Eisenhower Institute featured Gabor Boritt, author of The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows, for a book event at the Institute on January 24, 2007. The Gettysburg Gospel attempts to reconstruct what happened on November 19, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln gave one of history's most memorable speeches: the Gettysburg Address.

Professor Boritt's book was featured on the cover of the December 4, 2006 issue of The U.S. News and World Report. Boritt says that few people initially recognized the importance of the Gettysburg Address and it was, at times, hilariously misquoted. Some of the reporters covering the event didn't even think it was the best speech of the day. Boritt's work deftly tears away a century of myths, lies, and legends to give us a clear understanding of why and how Lincoln's short speech grew into American historical scripture.

Boritt holds the Fluhrer Professorship of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College and serves as the director of the College's Civil War Institute. He is the founding chair of the board of the Lincoln Prize, one of the foremost scholarly prizes in the field of American History. He has held visiting appointments at the universities of Cambridge, London, Harvard, and Michigan (Ann Arbor). He is author, co-author and editor of fifteen books on Lincoln and the Civil War.

Among Boritt's various awards and fellowships is a recent Congressional appointment to the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.