David W. Blight Wins 2019 William H. Seward Award
The Civil War Forum was honored to present its 2019
William H. Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography to David W.
Blight for his 2018 book, Frederick
Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, the 2019 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in
History. David Blight is currently
professor of American History at Yale University since 2003, after having taught
for 13 years at Amherst College, and at Harvard University before that. At Yale,
he is also the Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery,
Resistance and Abolition. He has served as the William Pitt Professor of
American History at England's Cambridge University; the Rogers Distinguished
Fellow in 19th Century American History at the esteemed Huntington Library in
California; and a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B Cullman Center for Writers
and Scholars at the New York Public Library, in addition to having been elected
to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His previous works on this facet
of American History are Frederick Douglass'
Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee; Race
and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their
Narratives of Emancipation; and Beyond
the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War. He has numerous
other writing and editing accomplishments, has been a Book Review editor for several
leading newspapers, and teaches summer institutes for park rangers and
historians in the National Park Service. Read more about David Blight at http://www.davidwblight.com/.
The Seward Award is endowed through the generosity of James W. Davis, a founding member of the Forum. The Award includes an invitation to visit the Forum in New York City and a $2,000 stipend. Winners are chosen by the Forum's Seward Award Committee. Past winners of the Seward Award are listed below.
About the Charles K. Schwarz Lecture
The Forum holds a series of lectures in memory of our beloved colleague, guiding spirit, and founding member Charles K. Schwarz. Charlie died in September 2016 at age 87 and is missed by all who knew him. He had a keen mind and an encyclopedic memory, as anyone who talked about baseball, hockey, movies, or politics can attest, and his passion (second only to his family) was the Civil War.
Charlie's family and friends made a generous contribution to the Forum in his memory and many Forum members added their own memorial contributions. The Forum's Board and Charlie's family agreed that an appropriate way to use these funds, and one that Charlie would have liked, would be for a series of lectures in Charlie's memory.
The inaugural Charles K. Schwarz Lecture was held on September 25, 2017, at Villa Mosconi, 69 MacDougall Street, New York City. The speaker was Dr. Anthony Waskie of Temple University. Dr. Waskie was especially appropriate as a speaker for this Lecture beyond his expertise on the Civil War because he has devoted a lifetime of effort to advancing the study and understanding of the Civil War in Philadelphia. In addition to serving as co-chair of the Civil War & Emancipation Studies Program at Temple University (where he is also an Assistant Professor of German), he is Vice-President of the Grand Army of the Republic Museum in Philadelphia, President of the General Meade Society, and a Trustee of the Laurel Hill Cemetery. Dr. Waskie is the author of Philadelphia and the Civil War, which was published by History Press in 2011.
Past Winners of the William H. Seward Award For Excellence in Civil War Biography
| Year | Author | Title |
| 2009 | Joan Waugh |
U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth |
| 2010 | Gail Stephens |
Shadow of Shiloh: Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace |
| 2011 | Tony Horwitz |
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War |
| 2012 | Henry W. Brands |
The Man Who Saved the Union In War and In Peace, Ulysses S. Grant |
| 2013 | Walter Stahr |
Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man |
| 2014 | Robert W. Lull |
Civil War General and Indian Fighter, James M. Williams |
| 2015 | Robert L. O'Connell |
Fierce Patriot -- The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman |
| 2015 | S. C. Gwynne |
Rebel Yell: The Vision, passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson |
| 2016 | T.J. Stiles |
Custer's Trials |
| 2017 | Ronald C. White | American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant |
| 2017 | Timothy Egan |
Immortal Irishman |
**Announcing the 2020 CWFMNY Battlefield Tour to Chattanooga-Chickamaugua
May 14-17, 2020**
This will be a plane trip. To reserve a seat on the plane, please send a $50 check to made out to the CWFMNY to the attention of Howard and Phyllis Rosenthal, 166-25 Powells Cove Blvd., 2A. Whitestone, NY 11357. Make sure you include your $50 dues to the Civil War Forum, if you have not yet paid.
Looking Back: An Unforgettable Visit to Kentucky
Our 2017 battlefield tour brought us to Kentucky. After four days of fascinating battlefield sites, historic houses, stunning countryside, superb food, and good company, we returned to New York with a better understanding of the quotation attributed to President Lincoln that he would like to have God on his side in the war but he had to have Kentucky.
From our base in Richmond, we visited the Mary Todd Lincoln House and the Cemetery in Lexington, the Camp nelson depot and recruiting station for enlisting newly emancipated freedmen into the Army, the battlefields of Mill Springs, Richmond, and Perryville, and White Hall, the home of the emancipationist Cassius M. Clay, who served as President Lincoln's Ambassador to Russia. Kent Masterson Brown gave us a unique treat as he explained the interrelationship of different families in Kentucky as he showed us around the Lexington Cemetery, including the graves of Henry Clay (and numerous descendants), John C. Breckinridge, and members of the Todd family, all in the midst of one of the most beautiful resting places on the planet, with ancient trees erecting a natural cathedral over the undulating, rich, green sward beneath. An adventure awaited us at Perryville, as Chuck Lott gave us a hayride tour of the battlefield; his presentation of the battle was vivid and we avoided any disasters on the hayride despite a few near-misses with ongoing traffic when we were on the public roads. One other special moment -- our dinner at Boone Tavern, which is part of Berea College. Not only did we dine exquisitely, we had the opportunity to learn the fascinating history of Berea College; how it was founded before the Civil War by Quaker abolitionists specifically to educate people who were not wealthy, including African-Americans, at a time when most slave states outlawed teaching them to read and write
Phyllis and Howard Rosenthal put in a tremendous amount of hard work advancing the trip and deserve our warmest thanks. As they have every year, they identified superb guides, found convivial places to dine, and brought good cheer wherever we went. It's easy to overlook how much work goes on behind a smooth running operation, but useful to remember that the smoother the operation runs, the more the effort that went into it in the first place.
Join our Forum Now!
We come from all walks of life but share a common passion for the Civil War Era. We enjoy each others' company as we discuss the Civil War among ourselves at our monthly meetings and on our annual Civil War tour. We take interest and respect any argument that is well-founded sincerely given; even an argument that we disagree with can educate us as to weaknesses in our own thinking or confirm our confidence in our views.
Membership in the Civil War Forum is $60 per year, and entitles the member to attend meetings at the member rate, receive our newsletter The Sharpshooter, receive email notifications of our Forum meetings and events, and join our annual Civil War tour. You may
join by paying dues at one of our meetings or by sending a check to our Treasurer, David Rothfeld, at 120 Bethpage Road, Suite 301, Hicksville, New York 11801-1515. We look forward to seeing you!
Scroll right for information on our William H. Seward Award and Charles K. Schwarz Lecture.
Ronald C. White
on
"On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain"
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
5:30 p.m. drinks, followed by 6:00 p.m. dinner
at
Villa Mosconi, 69 MacDougal St, New York, NY
$60 per person
RSVP Ann Plogsterth at plogsterth@aol.com or 212-877-6814
Ronald C. White’s new biography, On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, was published in October 2023. Ron is also the narrator for the audiobook, and the paperback edition will be published on November 12.
Originally a Bowdoin College professor, Gen. Chamberlain’s big moment was the famous bayonet charge at Gettysburg. After the war he served as governor of Maine and president of
Bowdoin. He became a prominent figure in the literary battles of the so-called “Second Civil
War,” the period beginning in the 1870s when Civil War veterans wrote in defense of their actions in the war.
Ron is the author of two New York Times bestselling presidential biographies: A. Lincoln: A Biography in 2009, and American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant in 2016. USA Today said, “If you read one book about Lincoln, make it A. Lincoln.” His American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant won our Seward Award—our award!—for “Excellence in Civil War Biography.” Other books include Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural in 2002, The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words in 2005, and Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President in 2021.
White is a graduate of UCLA and Princeton Theological Seminary and received a Ph.D. from
Princeton University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum in Washington, D.C., and has
taught at UCLA, Whitworth University, Colorado College, and Princeton Theological Seminary.
