Walter Berns, John Lewis Gaddis, Richard Gilder, Alan Charles Kors, Lewis Lehrman, The Papers of George Washington: Receive National Humanities Medal Awarded by President Bush
The National Humanities Medal, first awarded in 1989 as the Charles Frankel Prize, honors individuals and organizations whose work has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened citizens' engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand America's access to important humanities resources.
Walter Berns (Washington, D.C.), a political scientist, is a leading authority on the history of the U.S. Constitution. He is the John M. Olin University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Berns also taught at Louisiana State University, Yale University, Cornell University, Colgate University, and University of Toronto. He earned his master's and doctorate degrees in political science at the University of Chicago and has published many works on American government and society. Among them are: Making Patriots (2001), Taking the Constitution Seriously (1987), In Defense of Liberal Democracy (1984), The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy (1976), and Freedom, Virtue, and the First Amendment (1957). His articles have also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Berns served on the National Council on the Humanities from 1982 to 1988 and the Council of Scholars in the Library of Congress from 1981 to 1985. He was also a delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
John Lewis Gaddis (New Haven, Conn.), is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History and Political Science at Yale University. Educated at the University of Texas in Austin, Gaddis has also taught at Ohio University, the United States Naval War College, the University of Helsinki, Princeton University, and Oxford University. His books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972, second edition 2000); Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History (1978, second edition 1990); Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (1982, revised and expanded edition 2005); The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987); The United States and the End of the Cold War: Reconsiderations, Implications, Provocations (1992); We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997); The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (2002); and Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (2004). His latest book, The Cold War: A New History, will appear from Penguin Press at the end of this year. Gaddis teaches Cold War history, grand strategy, international studies, and biography at Yale, where he was the 2003 recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa William Clyde DeVane Award for undergraduate teaching. He is on the advisory board of the Cold War International History Project and is currently working on a biography of George F. Kennan.
Richard Gilder (New York, N.Y.) is co-founder and co-chairman of the Gilder Lehrman Collection and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to promote the love and study of American History, now with teaching programs in fifty states, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale. Gilder and Lewis Lehrman are founders and sponsors of the Lincoln Prize, the Frederick Douglass Book Award, and co-sponsors of the George Washington Book Prize. In 1971, he pioneered the renovation of Central Park and in 1978 became a founding and continuing trustee of the Central Park Conservancy. He also participated in the transformation of the Hayden Planetarium and of its parent, the American Museum of Natural History, into the world-class institutions they have become. In 2003 he joined the Board of the New-York Historical Society, where he serves as co-chairman, and he is a trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and the American Museum of Natural History. Gilder heads the brokerage firm Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co.
Alan Charles Kors (Wallingford, Pa.), has been teaching European intellectual history since 1968 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is professor of history and holds the George H. Walker Endowed Term Chair. He has published extensively on the conceptual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was recently editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, an international project published in four volumes in 2002. Kors was confirmed by the United States Senate in 1992 to the National Council on the Humanities, serving in that capacity for six years. He has served on the executive boards of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and The Historical Society, where he is on the Board of Governors. He has done two videotape and audio courses for The Teaching Company, one on "The Birth of the Modern Mind" and one on "Voltaire: The Mind of the Enlightenment." Kors has been involved in the defense of academic freedom since his arrival at the University of Pennsylvania. His colleagues at Penn have elected him four times to University and School Committees on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, and since 1998 he has been chairman of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He has received two awards, the Lindback Foundation Award and the Ira Abrams Memorial Award, for distinguished college teaching, numerous awards for the defense of academic freedom, and, in 2005, The Conference on Value Inquiry Award for "extraordinary contributions to the appreciation and advancement of human values." He writes and lectures widely on academic life. In 1998, he coauthored, with Harvey Silvergate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses.
Lewis Lehrman (Greenwich, Conn.), is currently a senior partner, L. E. Lehrman & Co., an investment firm he established, and the co-founder and co-chairman of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which promotes the teaching of history in American high schools and colleges through seminars, workshops and an extensive Web site featuring original documents. Lehrman was the Cardinal Cooke honoree in 1983 of the Archdiocese of New York for his early work in developing the Inner City Scholarship Fund. He has been a trustee of the American Enterprise Institute, the Morgan Library, the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation. He is a former Chairman of the Committee on Humanities of the Yale University Council. In April of 1987, Lehrman joined Morgan Stanley & Company, investment bankers, as a senior advisor and a director of Morgan Stanley Asset Management. In 1988, he became a managing director of the firm. Lehrman has written books and articles on American history, national security, and economic and monetary policy. He has co-authored the book Money and the Coming World Order (1976). He has also written on economic, foreign policy and national security issues in publications such as Harper's, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Policy Review. He actively lectures and writes on economic and American history. He has published numerous articles on Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, and other historical figures, in addition to teaching a seminar on Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg College. He is the managing partner of the Gilder Lehrman Collection, a national resource of American historical documents, now on deposit at the New-York Historical Society, where he is also a trustee. Lehrman is co-founder of the Lincoln Prize, given annually to the best scholarly work published on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. The Gilder Lehrman Institute is a co-sponsor of the George Washington Book Prize. Lehrman is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, which gives the annual Frederick Douglass Prize. He is chairman of The Lehrman Institute, a public policy research and grant making Foundation founded in 1972. The Lehrman Institute created The Lincoln Institute, which has promoted the study of America's 16th president--particularly through five Web sites (see: www.abrahamlincoln.org).
The Papers of George Washington (Charlottesville, Va.), was established in 1969 at the University of Virginia, under the joint auspices of the university and the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union, to publish a complete edition of Washington's correspondence. Letters written to Washington, as well as letters and documents written by him, will eventually be published in the complete edition that will consist of approximately 90 volumes. Fifty-two volumes are now finished. The new edition is supported financially by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, as well as the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and the University of Virginia. The staff spent much of the first ten years of the project's life collecting Washington documents from repositories and private owners all over the United States and Europe. The 135,000 Washington documents now deposited in photographic form in the project's offices represent one of the richest collections of American historical manuscripts extant. There is almost no facet of research on life and enterprise in the late colonial and early national periods that will not be enhanced by material from these documents. The publication of Washington's papers will make this source material available not only to scholars, but also to all Americans interested in the founding of their nation. Theodore J. Crackel, editor-in-chief of the Papers of George Washington Project, will accept the National Humanities Medal on behalf of the project.