Past Winners

Charles R. Kesler is a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute, Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.

Dr. Kesler also teaches in the Claremont Institute’s annual Publius and Lincoln Fellows Programs. From 1989 to 2008, Dr. Kesler was director of the Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World at Claremont McKenna College. From 2000 to 2001, he served as vice chairman of the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Congress's James Madison Commemoration Commission.

In 2017, Dr. Kesler was named as one of the “Politico 50” - the publication’s annual list of the key thinkers, doers and visionaries who are reshaping American politics and policy.In 2000, he was selected as a member of the Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Issue sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society.

Dr. Kesler is the author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism; the editor of Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding; co-editor, with John B. Kienker, of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Ten Years of the Claremont Review of Books; and co-editor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought. He has written extensively on American constitutionalism and political thought, and his edition of The Federalist Papers is the best-selling edition in the country.

Dr. Kesler received his B.A. in Social Studies and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. His work appears frequently in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Post, Claremont Review of Books, National Review, Real Clear Politics, and The Federalist.

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Allen C. Guelzo is Director of Civil War Era Studies and the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. During 2017-18, he has served as Visiting Professor in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.

Dr. Guelzo is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, which won both the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize in 2000; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, which also won the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize in 2005; Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America; Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas; and Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction. In 2012 he published Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction and in 2013 Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which won the 2014 Lincoln Prize, the 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 and Reconstruction: A Concise History.

Dr. Guelzo has been awarded the Lincoln Medal of the Union League Club of New York City, the Lincoln Award of the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, and the Lincoln Award of the Union League of Philadelphia, in addition to the James Q. Wilson Award for Distinguished Scholarship on the Nature of a Free Society. He has been a Fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.

Dr. Guelzo has written for the New York Times; Washington Post; Los Angeles Times; The Wall Street Journal; Christian Science Monitor; National Affairs; First Things; U.S. News & World Report; The Weekly Standard; Washington Monthly; National Review; Daily Beast; and Claremont Review of Books. Additionally, he has been featured on NPR; The Daily Show with Jon Stewart; Meet the Press; Great Divide Pictures’ The Civil War: The Untold Story; CNN’s Race to the White House: Lincoln vs. Douglas; and Brian Lamb’s Booknotes.

From 2006 to 2013, Dr. Guelzo served as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania.

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