Contact: Kay Fike Jones
A Mississippi State University history professor is joining the board of advisers of a national organization dedicated to the study of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.
John Marszalek is one of 50 board members of The Lincoln Forum, a new association based at Winchester, Va., that will sponsor an annual symposium and present an award in honor of the nation's 16th president.
The first symposium will be held Nov. 16-19 at Gettysburg (Pa.) College to coincide with the anniversary of Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address. The year-old forum sponsors tours and student essay competitions, publishes a newsletter and symposium proceedings and honors an individual for contributions to the field of Lincoln studies.
Among board members are filmmaker Ken Burns, famous for his PBS series on the Civil War; Norman Hellmers, superintendent of the Lincoln Home National Historical Site in Springfield, Ill.; Michael Malone, Ford's Theater National Historic Site in Washington, D.C.; Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.); and historians David Donald of Harvard University; Don E. Fehrenbacher of Stanford; Eric Foner of Columbia University; William Gienapp of Harvard; and James M. McPherson of Princeton.
Frank Williams, a Lincoln scholar who is associate justice of the Superior Court of Rhode Island, is board chair. Vice Chairman Harold Holzer is the author of 10 books on Lincoln and the Civil War and vice president for communications at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Marszalek is the author of "Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order," a biography of Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. The book, his second on the controversial Civil War general, was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize.