The Lincoln & Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College announced last Thursday that Professor of History and Black Studies David Blight '59 won this year's Lincoln Prize for his book, "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory."

"I'm delighted," said Blight. "[The Lincoln Prize] has become a very important prize. I'm not sure this book deserved it, but I'm thrilled."

The award is given annually, along with its accompanying $50,000 prize, to honor scholarly works about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era. Blight's book has also received the 2001 Frederick Douglass Prize, which is awarded each year to an outstanding work on slavery.

"It is especially gratifying to be honoring a Civil War book that has also been recognized as the year's best book on slavery, resistance and abolition," said Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, who endow the Lincoln Prize, according to a press release issued by Gettysburg College. "The fact that the same title has earned both honors validates the very argument that Professor Blight makes so forcefully in his penetrating book: that slavery was at the very heart of the Civil War."

Blight's work is one of the first to be recognized from the emerging field of historical memory studies.

"Anthropologists have looked at memory for a long time," said Blight. "Recently, historians have developed an interest in the process by which groups and nations structure those memories-particularly how we structure the past for use in the present."

Blight taught a seminar at the College with the same title as his award-winning book, and he credits his former students for contributing insights to his work.

"[The students in my seminar] were very valuable to this book," said Blight. "I also acknowledged four Amherst students who worked as research assistants because they did very serious, invaluable research for me."

Blight intends to discontinue the seminar, possibly to make room for a class on the memory of slavery-the topic which he is currently researching for his next major work.

"I am not surprised that he won such an honor," said LaShauna Barboza '04, one of Blight's students. "It is obvious that he is very well versed in his subject matter. He is continually able to add personal anecdotes and astute commentary to the readings and class work."

Blight will be honored at a ceremony at the Union League Club of New York on April 2, where he will receive a bust of Lincoln that has been previously awarded to noted historians Ken Burns, James McPhearson and John Hope Franklin.