Holt book honored

History department chair Michael F. Holt, the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History, earned a second-prize award of $10,000 in the prestigious Lincoln Prize competition for his book, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford University Press). A comprehensive history of the party, which was formed in the early 1800s in opposition to the Democratic Party, Holt's work is also a political history of the U.S. during the tumultuous Antebellum period.

Lincoln Prize awards will be formally presented at an April 18 dinner in New York City. The Lincoln Prize was created by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, who have long-standing interests in Lincoln and the Civil War, and professor Gabor Boritt, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. A panel of historians has selected the prize recipients each year since its inception in 1991.