Civil War Historian Wins $100,000 Prize for Lifetime Achievement

James M. McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil War era, has won the first Pritzker Military Library Literature Award, a $100,000 prize presented for lifetime accomplishments in military history. Mr. McPherson, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton University, won the Pulitzer for Battle Cry of Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1988), part of the Oxford History of the United States. Among his many other books, he has written about what motivated Civil War soldiers to fight and about Abraham Lincoln’s “second American Revolution.” He is also the author of a widely used textbook on the Civil War and Reconstruction. The award, which will be presented in October, is sponsored by the Chicago-based Tawani Foundation. —Andrew Mytelka