Allen Guelzo is a New York Times best-selling author, American historian, and commentator on public issues. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, National Affairs, First Things, U.S. News & World Report, The Weekly Standard, Washington Monthly, National Review, The Daily Beast, and The Claremont Review of Books, and has been featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday” and “On Point,” “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” (2008), “Meet the Press: Press Pass with David Gregory”, “The Civil War: The Untold Story” (Great Divide Pictures, 2014), “Race to the White House: Lincoln vs. Douglas” (CNN, 2016), “Legends and Lies: The Civil War” (Fox, 2018), “Reconstruction” (PBS, 2019) and Brian Lamb’s “Booknotes.” In 2010, he was nominated for a Grammy Award along with David Straithern and Richard Dreyfuss for their production of the entirety of The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (BBC Audio). In 2018, he was a winner of the Bradley Prize, along with Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal and Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute.
He is Director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. Previously, he was the Director of Civil War Era Studies and the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. During 2010-11 and again in 2017-18, he served as the Wm. L. Garwood Visiting Professor in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He holds an MA and PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania.
Among his many award-winning publications, he is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Wm. Eerdmans, 1999), which won both the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize in 2000; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster, 2004) which also won the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize, for 2005; Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (Simon & Schuster, 2008), on the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858; a volume of essays, Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009) which won a Certificate of Merit from the Illinois State Historical Association in 2010; and Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (in the Oxford University Press ‘Very Short Introductions’ series. In 2012, he published Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction with Oxford University Press, and in 2013 Alfred Knopf published his book on the battle of Gettysburg (for the 150th anniversary of the battle), Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which spent eight weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. Gettysburg: The Last Invasion won the Lincoln Prize for 2014, the inaugural Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York City Round Table, and the Richard Harwell Award of the Atlanta Civil War Round Table. His most recent publications are Redeeming the Great Emancipator (Harvard University Press, 2016) which originated as the 2012 Nathan Huggins Lectures at Harvard University, and Reconstruction: A Concise History (Oxford University Press, 2018).
