Statement from James G. Basker,
President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

NEW YORK, NY (May 4, 2007)

The Gilder Lehrman History Scholars program is designed to honor and support outstanding students of history, and to remedy the shortage of college graduates pursuing careers in history, whether as school teachers, college professors, documentary film makers, writers, or public historians. The History Scholars program solicits nominations of outstanding history majors in their sophomore and junior years from every college and university in the United States and Canada. From these hundreds of promising candidates, fifteen are selected to participate in a five-week program in New York that includes research training, special seminars with leading historians, behind-the-scenes visits to archives and museums, and the opportunity to publish original research. Fifty more students are chosen from the finalist pool for a one-week version of this program. Thus, each year, sixty-five young scholars are given a boost in their careers as budding historians.

In the summer of 2007, Gilder Lehrman History Scholars will be researching forgotten abolitionist writings by African Americans in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Most scholarship on the abolitionist movement focuses on famous figures like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others who flourished between 1820 and 1860. This publication project, however, will bring to light an earlier generation of abolitionist writings by African Americans that emerged in the era of the American Revolution and the early decades of the new republic. The result will be a series of newly republished African American writings with annotation and introductions, designed to make them useful to teachers, students and the general reading public.

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