Gabor Boritt

Gabor Boritt (born 1940) is the Robert Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Born in World War II Hungary, he participated as a teenager in the 1956 revolution against the Soviet Union. He escaped to the United States, where he received his higher education and became a scholar of Lincoln and the Civil War. He is the author, co-author, or editor of sixteen books about Lincoln and the American Civil War. His life story is the subject of a feature-length documentary film titled "Budapest to Gettysburg". Boritt and his wife live on a farm near the Gettysburg Battlefield, where they have raised their three sons.

Early life

Boritt was born in Budapest, Hungary, at the start of World War II. The Nazis forced his family to live in a single room in a hospital on the ghetto’s edge. Here he played upon bloodstained floors. As his father helped lead resistance against the Nazis, his grandfather’s family was deported from the countryside and murdered in Auschwitz. By the end of the war, Budapest was in ruins and Hungary in Stalin’s grip. In the years that followed, Boritt’s mother died, his father and brother were imprisoned, and he was sent to an orphanage. In 1956, sixteen-year-old Boritt joined the Hungarian Revolution. He remembers the initial euphoria, saying “We thought it was a whole new world. Anything was possible.” Days later, 3,000 Soviet tanks crushed those possibilities. Boritt and his sister Judith headed for the Austrian border. In darkness, they hiked through wooded hills. They came to a no-man’s-land guarded by watchtowers with machine guns. Freedom lay on the other side. Together, they started running.Fact|date=September 2007

Escape to America

After months at an Austrian refugee camp, Boritt came to America, with one dollar in his pocket. He arrived in the “dirtiest city” he had ever seen: New York. Told that America is “out west,” Boritt headed to South Dakota.Fact|date=September 2007 He wanted to learn English, and picked up a free booklet of Abraham Lincoln’s writings. Captivated by Lincoln’s mastery of the language and his rise from poverty to the presidency, Boritt began studying American history and earned his bachelor of arts degree from Yankton College in 1962 and earned his Masters degree from the University of South Dakota the following year. Boritt earned a Ph.D. from Boston University in 1968. As an immigrant, he felt obliged to go to Vietnam, where he taught soldiers about the American Civil War. In 1978, he published his first book, "Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream". A 1995 survey of leading experts by The Civil War Times lists it as one of the ten most important books ever written about the 16th President. It placed at the center of Lincoln’s outlook what Boritt called “the right to rise.”Fact|date=September 2007

Gettysburg College

In 1981, Boritt came to Gettysburg College. He founded the Civil War Institute and the school created for him the nation’s first fully funded chair for the study of the Civil War. [ [http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/books/boritt.htm Author Interview with Gabor Boritt ] ] He helped create the $50,000 Lincoln Prize, widely considered the most coveted award for the study of American history. [ [http://www.gilderlehrman.org/historians/fellowship2.html The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. For Historians. Fellowships and Prizes ] ] He also helped create the Gilder Lehrman Institute, which is rapidly becoming a leader in improving the teaching of history in schools. [ [http://www.gilderlehrman.org/index.html The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History . Home ] ]

Modern Accomplishments

Today, Gabor Boritt serves on the boards of the Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by Congress. His latest book "The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows" was featured on the cover of U.S. News and World Report and called "fascinating" by the New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/books/04masl.html] .Fact|date=September 2007 In September 2008 Gabor Boritt gave a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield to President George W. Bush, Laura Bush and a group of close advisors including White House Advisor Karl Rove, Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and others. [York Daily Record [http://ydr.inyork.com/ci_10394290]

Together with his wife Liz, he raised three sons. They live in an 18th-century farmhouse on the edge of the battlefield which they restored with their own hands. It served as both a stop on the Underground Railroad and as a Confederate hospital.

References

ee also

*Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College
*Lincoln Prize
*Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
*Gettysburg College

External links

* [http://www.boritt.com Budapest to Gettysburg]
* [http://www.GettysburgGospel.com The Gettysburg Gospel]
* [http://www.gettysburg.edu/civilwar/ Gettysburg College Civil War Institute]
* [http://www.abrahamlincoln200.org/about-the-commission/commissioners/boritt/default.aspx?ekmensel=c580fa7b_8_46_btnlink Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission]
* [http://www.pritzkermilitarylibrary.org/events/2007-01-25-gaborBoritt.jsp Interview] on "The Gettysburg Gospel" at the Pritzker Military Library