Mark E. Neely, Jr.

For the sports announcer, see Mark Neely.

Mark E. Neely, Jr. (born November 10, 1944 in Amarillo, Texas) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian best known as an authority on the U.S. Civil War in general and Abraham Lincoln in particular.

Biography

Neely was born in Texas. He earned his BA in American Studies and Ph.D. in history at Yale University in 1966 and 1973. Yale's Graduate School awarded him a Wilbur Cross Medal in 1995.

In 1971–1972 Neely was a visiting instructor at Iowa State University. In 1972 he was named director of the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a position he held for 20 years.

In 1992 Dr. Neely was named the John Francis Bannon Professor of History and American Studies at Saint Louis University. In 1998 he was named the McCabe Greer Professor of Civil War History at Pennsylvania State University.

Neely is best known for his 1991 book The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, which won both the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 1992 Bell I. Wiley Prize. In March 1991 he published an article in the magazine Civil War History entitled "Was the Civil War a Total War?", which is considered one of the top three most influential articles on the war written in the last half of the 20th Century.

Works

• 1981 – The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia
• 1984 – (with Gabor S. Boritt and Harold Holzer) The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print
• 1985 – (with Gabor S. Boritt and Harold Holzer) Changing The Lincoln Image
• 1986 – (with R. Gerald McMurtry) The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln
• 1987 – (with Boritt and Holzer) The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause
• 1990 – (with Holzer) The Lincoln Family Album
• 1991 – The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (winner of the Pulitzer and Wiley prizes mentioned above)
• 1993 – (with Holzer) Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in America
• 1993 – The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of American (for which he received the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award from the National Jesuit Honor Society)
• 1999 – Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism
• 2000 – (with Holzer) The Union Image: Popular Prints in the Civil War North
• 2002 – The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North
• 2005 – The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era
• 2007 – The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction
• 2011 – Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (U of North Carolina Press); 408 covers the U.S. and the Confederate constitutions and their role in the conflict.

External links

• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Neely on The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America, June 12, 1994.
• Mark E. Neely at Library of Congress Authorities, with 23 catalog records