Officers
Harold Holzer, Chairman
Harold Holzer (www.haroldholzer.com), who served as Chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and co-chair of the U.S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, has authored, co-authored, and edited 55 books, including The Lincoln Image, Lincoln on Democracy, Lincoln: President-Elect, and Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America, the official young reader’s companion book to the Spielberg film Lincoln, for which Harold served as script consultant. He has written more than 600 articles for popular and scholarly publications, and chapters or introductions in 60 additional volumes. Holzer’s 2014 book, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, won the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and five additional awards. His latest books are Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French (2019) and The Presidents vs. the Press (2020). A frequent guest on TV and a popular lecturer who has partnered with such actors as Sam Waterston at venues including the White House, Harold earned a 2008 National Humanities Medal from President Bush. Following 23 years as Senior Vice President of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, he has served since 2015 as Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. Before becoming Forum Chairman in 2018, Harold served for more than 20 years as founding Vice-Chairman. Harold and his wife, Edith, live in Rye, NY. They have two grown daughters and two grandsons.
Jonathan W. White, Vice Chairman
Jonathan W. White is a professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University and is the author or editor of 13 books, including Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman (2011), and Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (2014), which was a finalist for both the Lincoln Prize and Jefferson Davis Prize, and winner of the Abraham Lincoln Institute’s 2015 book prize. He has published more than 100 articles, essays, and reviews, and won the 2005 John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article in Civil War History, the 2010 Hay-Nicolay Dissertation Prize, and the 2012 Thomas Jefferson Prize for his Guide to Research in Federal Judicial History (2010). His most recent books include Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War (2017) and “Our Little Monitor”: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War (2018), which he co-authored with Anna Gibson Holloway, To Address You As My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln (2021), My Work Among the Freedmen: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of Harriet M. Buss (2021), and A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (2022). Check out his website at www.jonathanwhite.org/ or follow him on Twitter at @CivilWarJon.
Michelle A. Krowl, Secretary
Michelle A. Krowl is the Civil War and Reconstruction specialist in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. She received a B.A. in History from the University of California, Riverside, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of several articles and books on topics relating to the Civil War, as well as Quantico, Virginia and the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. She has worked as a library assistant at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., an assistant professor at Northern Virginia Community College, and as a research assistant for historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Paul Ward, CPA, Treasurer
Paul Ward is a certified public accountant and certified elder law attorney who practices in Williamsburg, Virginia. A life member of the Lincoln Forum, Paul participates in his local civil war roundtable and other civil war history-related activities in Virginia and at Gettysburg. Prior to moving to Virginia, he practiced as a CPA and attorney in Indiana for many years. Paul is a retired Army National Guard finance officer and holds an MBA in finance from Indiana University. He lives in Williamsburg with his wife Deborah.
Diane Brennan, Administrator
Diane works full-time at Gettysburg College in the Office of the Provost, where she has also worked with the American Civil War and public policy programs. Until the spring of 2021, she served as the prize administrator for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Diane recently completed her undergraduate degree at Gettysburg College with a major in Art History. Diane lives in the mountains northwest of Gettysburg with her husband Don and fur son Indy. She is incredibly proud of her son Robert, who is currently working in the medical field as an emergency room nurse.
Lieutenant General Christopher F. Burne, United States Air Force (retired), Executive Committee
Lieutenant General Christopher F. Burne, United States Air Force (retired) was the 17th Judge Advocate General of the Air Force. Following the lead of his father, a decorated World War II Eighth Air Force veteran, he served as an active duty military attorney for 35 years, ultimately earning the rank of 3-star general. As the Air Force’s top uniformed lawyer, General Burne was the Legal Adviser to the Secretary of the Air Force and all officers and agencies of the Department of the Air Force. He was responsible for the professional direction of 4,500 military and civilian attorneys and paralegals and administrative civilians. His duties took him around the globe to 30 countries, in addition to the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, and the White House. He twice deployed to the Persian Gulf region in support of Operations Desert Storm and Southern Watch. He was on duty in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, during the terrorist attack, then served on the Crisis Action Team directing mobilization and response operations from the Pentagon’s underground control center. General Burne is a two-time recipient of the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal.
A native of Dunmore, PA, General Burne is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Scranton. He received his Juris Doctor in 1983 from The Dickinson School of Law and holds a master’s degree in National Security Strategy from the National War College in Washington, D.C. He is admitted to practice law before the United States Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. General Burne is now the President of Charged With Excellence, a limited liability company he founded for leadership consulting and public speaking. He resides in Gettysburg with his wife, Colonel (retired) Robin Pond Burne, from Petersburg, Virginia.
Kathryn Harris, Executive Committee
Kathryn M. Harris is a graduate of Southern Illinois University – Carbondale, her hometown. She holds an undergraduate degree in French with a minor in Secondary Education. She wanted to be a high school French teacher, but that was not to be. Having worked in the university library as an undergrad, on a whim, she applied to the University of Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science, was accepted, and received her MSLIS in 1972. In 2015, she retired as Library Services Director from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (ALPLM, formerly the Illinois State Historical Library). She has served as President of the Abraham Lincoln Association, the first woman and African American to hold that position since its founding in 1909. Currently, she serves on the Board of Trustees for the ALPLM and the Springfield and Central Illinois African American Museum. Active in her community, she was selected “First Citizen” by her local newspaper in 2020.
Tom Horrocks, Executive Committee
Thomas A. Horrocks is an independent scholar. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania and spent 30 years working as a library administrator, including positions as Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Associate Librarian for Collections at Houghton Library, Harvard University; and Director of the John Hay Library at Brown University. In addition to his library management career, Dr. Horrocks has taught at Harvard Extension School and has published numerous articles and books on American political history, with emphasis on Abraham Lincoln and his time. He has authored, edited, and co-edited eight books, including four on Lincoln, Harvard’s Lincoln (2010), The Living Lincoln, co-edited with Harold Holzer and Frank J. Williams (2011); Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies (2014), and most recently, The Annotated Lincoln, co-edited with Harold Holzer and published by Harvard University Press in 2016.
John F. Marszalek, Executive Committee
John F. Marszalek joined the Mississippi State University History Faculty in 1973. He became the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor of History in 1994. He retired as an emeritus Giles Professor of History in 2002. He served over ten years as mentor of the undergraduate distinguished scholars and since 2008 as the executive director and managing editor of the Ulysses S. Grant Association. He has produced over twenty masters and doctoral students. His biography of William T. Sherman, A Soldier’s Passion for Order, was a runner up for the Lincoln Prize and his book on one of the first black cadets at West Point, Court Martial: A Black Man in America, was made into a for-television Showtime movie. Before his academic career, he was an Army veteran in Vietnam and married Jeanne Kozmer Marszalek in 1965. He is the father of three sons and eight grandchildren.
Erin Carlson Mast, Executive Committee
Erin Carlson Mast has 20 years of experience leading cultural nonprofits. In 2021, she became the President & CEO of the Lincoln Presidential Foundation, where she led the rebranding, relaunch, and establishment of a new partnership with the National Park Service. For a decade prior, she served as CEO of President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington, DC, after having served as an original member of the capital project team. As CEO, she transitioned the site to an independent 501c3 and led the site to steady growth and recognition, including a Presidential Medal, “50 Great Places to Work,” and a Time magazine must-see destination. The Center for Nonprofit Advancement recognized Mast with the EXCEL Award for Chief Executive Leadership in 2017. Her other experience includes the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Building Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution. In addition to authoring essays and chapters in a variety of books on the museum and public history field, Mast’s writing has appeared in Alliance Labs, History News, Forum Journal, and The Public Historian.
Edna Greene Medford, Executive Committee
Edna Greene Medford is professor of history emeritus at Howard University, where she taught United States and African American history, with particular emphasis on the 19th century. She also held several administrative positions during her nearly 35 years at the institution: Chairperson of the Department of History, Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs. She is the author of Lincoln and Emancipation and numerous scholarly articles and chapters on the president. Her scholarship on Lincoln, the Civil War and Reconstruction has been shared in presentations to general audiences and in documentaries and interviews aired by C-SPAN, CNN, the History Channel, and other networks.
Craig L. Symonds, Executive Committee
Craig L. Symonds is professor of history emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he taught for thirty years and served as History Department Chair. From 2017 to 2020 he was the Ernest J. King Distinguished Professor of Maritime History at the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport, RI. He is a four-time recipient of the Federal Government’s Superior Civilian Service Medal, and in 2014 he received the Dudley W. Knox Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Naval Historical Foundation. He is the author of seventeen books, including Lincoln and His Admirals, which won the 2009 Lincoln Prize. His other Civil War era books include biographies of Joseph E. Johnston (1992), Patrick Cleburne (1997), and Franklin Buchanan (1999), as well as The Civil War at Sea (2009). He received the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Prize for the best book on naval history for his book Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History (2005). His more recent books focus on World War II, including The Battle of Midway (2011), Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (2014), and World War II at Sea: A Global History (2018). His newest book is Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay (2022).
Frank J. Williams, Chairman Emeritus
Frank J. Williams, Chairman Emeritus of The Lincoln Forum and one of the nation’s most prominent authorities, collectors, and leaders in the Lincoln field, was Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court (ret.) from 2001 to 2009, and Chief Judge of U.S. Court of Military Commissions, appointed by President George W. Bush. A decorated Vietnam veteran and longtime attorney and judge, he served for 12 years as president of the Lincoln Group of Boston, and for nine as president of the Abraham Lincoln Association, before helping to establish the Forum, which he served as Founding Chairman for its first 23 years. Until recently, he was also president (now emeritus) of the Ulysses S. Grant Association. The author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books, Williams co-edited Abraham Lincoln: Sources and Style of Leadership and Abraham Lincoln: Contemporary, and with Harold Holzer, authored Lincoln’s Deathbed in Art and Memory: The “Rubber Room” Phenomenon. In addition to Judging Lincoln, a collection of his essays, and The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (co-authored with Holzer and Edna Greene Medford), Williams co-edited The Mary Lincoln Enigma and authored Lincoln as Hero for the SIU Press “Concise Lincoln” series. He is also a popular lecturer whose papers have appeared in several books, including We Cannot Escape History and The Lincoln Forum series. A former member of the U.S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and its successor organization, the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, he lives with his wife Virginia in Hope Valley, RI. In 2017, they donated their exceptional Lincolniana collection to Mississippi State University, where it is now displayed in a gallery named in their honor at MSU’s Mitchell Library.