THE LINCOLN FORUM

The idea for The Lincoln Forum was born in January 1996—during an informal, unplanned, late-hour brainstorming session toward the end of a Civil War conference in South Florida. Co-founders Frank J. Williams and Harold Holzer—together with their late friends and colleagues Dr. David Long, Charles Platt, and Maynard Schrock—aspired from the start to create a new, national, East Coast-based Lincoln organization that could create a strong, multi-day symposium featuring the finest scholars in the country. From the very beginning, the goal was to attract the most acclaimed lecturers and the most solid scholarship—all while maintaining a “family” atmosphere that emphasized camaraderie and comfort among attendees from all parts of the United States.

Within weeks, the new Forum had attracted seed money from generous benefactors Platt and Williams, sought organizational advice from veteran event managers “Pete” Brown and Bob Maynard, and begun work on a mailing list culled at first from the founders’ contact lists. The Forum then enlisted the support of historian Gabor Boritt to site the annual event at the Gettysburg College professor’s historic hometown, and to schedule the conference for the days leading up to the annual commemoration of Lincoln’s November 19 Gettysburg Address at the National Soldiers’ Cemetery.

That very November 16, the organization was ready to convene for the first time at Gettysburg’s Eisenhower Inn, with speakers Richard Nelson Current, John Y. Simon, Daniel Weinberg, and James Kushlan, along with Williams and Holzer. Some 100 participants attended the initial symposium—with few on hand predicting it would be the first of twenty-six consecutive, ever-growing conferences.

The very first of its prestigious annual Richard Nelson Current lifetime achievement awards was bestowed that November, to Professor Boritt, with honorees like Brian Lamb of C-SPAN, legendary historian John Hope Franklin, and Illinois Senate lion Paul Simon quickly following as the Forum moved from the Eisenhower to the downtown Holiday Inn Battlefield. When that facility could no longer accommodate the growing demand for the annual symposium, the Forum moved again, this time to the Wyndham Gettysburg, where attendance since has routinely hovered at 300 participants and scholars.

In the decades since, the Forum has not only continued to attract loyal, repeat visitors, but extended outreach to first-time attendees, and created scholarship programs for teachers and students, as well as a college essay contest funded by the family of founding treasurer Chuck Platt. In addition to the Current Award, the Forum now bestows an annual prize for the best new Lincoln book. Continuing to attract leading speakers, performers, and panelists, the Forum regularly offers small-group discussion sessions, battlefield tours, film screenings, art galleries, a bookstore and an all-author book signing—all while maintaining the “family” atmosphere under which it was chartered.