Burlingame wins Lincoln Prize for book

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GETTYSBURG, Pa., Feb. 12 (UPI) -- Pennsylvania's Gettysburg College has announced Michael Burlingame is the winner of the 2010 Lincoln Prize for his biography "Abraham Lincoln: A Life."

Burlingame is to receive $50,000 for the two-volume biography he worked on for three decades and a bronze replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens' life-size bust, "Lincoln the Man," the college said. The prize, sponsored by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, is to be awarded April 27 at the Union League in New York.

Burlingame is the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair of Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

"Burlingame's massive biography of Abraham Lincoln is a landmark of American historical scholarship. Nothing surpasses Burlingame's comprehensive and detailed research into the entire life of Lincoln," Lehrman said in a statement Thursday. "His prose and arguments are always clear and straightforward, even if some judgments will be vigorously debated. Because the author of this extraordinary biography has unearthed new evidence and reviewed all previous scholarship, these debates will have to contend with the vast document-based evidence, which this Lincoln Prize winner brings to bear on the life of Lincoln. Every member of the literate general public, interested in Abraham Lincoln, is surely indebted to Burlingame for his tireless research into archives and newspapers never before examined."