Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant have been awarded the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for their work on the history of children serving in the U.S. Civil War.
Clarke, an associate professor of history at the University of Sydney, is the co-author of “Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era,” which was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. The book details the lives of young soldiers, some as young as 11 or 12, who served in the Civil War and the struggles of their parents to reclaim or liberate their underage sons from armies into which they had enlisted.
“Of Age” adds unexpected depth to our understanding of the tragedy that was the Civil War,” said Emeriti Larry D. Walker ’76, a trustee of Gettysburg College and a member of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize board. “This fine book gives the reader a sobering insight into the significance of boy soldiers making up such a large portion of the Union and Confederate armies.”
Plant, a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, is the co-editor of “Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policies in the Twentieth Century,” and co-author of “’The Crowning Insult’: Federal Segregation and the Gold Star Mother and Widow Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s.”
The Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, established in 1990, is awarded annually for the finest scholarly work in English on American Civil War history. The award “enhances the general public’s understanding of the Civil War era.”
Clarke and Plant will be recognized during an award ceremony in New York on April 4. They will share a $50,000 prize and a bronze replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s life-sized bust, Lincoln the Man.