Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He was born in Yokohama, Japan, in 1953, and grew up in Springfield (Delaware County), Pennsylvania. He holds the M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Crisis of the American Republic: A History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (1995), and followed that with an edition of Josiah G. Holland’s Life of Abraham Lincoln (1866) in 1998. His most important work, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999), won both the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize in 2000. In 2003, his article, “Defending Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and the Conkling Letter, August, 1863,” won Civil War History’s John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article of that year. His most recent work includes Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004) which won a second Lincoln Prize; a new book on the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (2008); a collection of his essays, Abraham Lincoln As A Man of Ideas (2009); and a brief Lincoln biography, Lincoln, in the Oxford University Press 'Very Short Introductions' series (2009). He has written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books and Books and Culture, and has been featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday,” Brian Lamb’s “Booknotes,” and "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." Together with Patrick Allitt and Gary W. Gallagher, he team-taught The Teaching Company’s new edition of its American History series, and as well as courses on DVD on Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Lincoln, on American intellectual history, The American Mind, and the American Revolution.