James Oakes, Professor of History and incumbent of the Humanities Chair at the Graduate Center, has received the Lincoln Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the field of American History. The award is in recognition of his book, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Anti-Slavery Politics (W. W. Norton, 2007).

Administered by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College, the annual prize honors outstanding historical work about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. Professor Oakes shares this year's award with Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who wrote Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters.

The jury commended Professor Oakes for the effectiveness of a "new comparative framework to analyze the careers of the wartime President and the nation's most important black leader." They also cited his "powerful" narrative, "designed for historians as well as general readers" which "flows seamlessly... sometimes with dramatic effect."

Previous winners of the Lincoln Prize include historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. This year's prize was formally presented at the Yale Club in New York on April 1.