Harold Holzer

Harold Holzer
Harold Holzer in 2011
Born	February 5, 1949
Nationality	American
Known for	scholar of Abraham Lincoln

Harold Holzer (born February 5, 1949) is a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the American Civil War Era. He won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and four other awards in 2015 for his book, Lincoln and the Power of the Press. Holzer served for nine years as co-chairman of the United States Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC), appointed to the commission by President Bill Clinton in 2000 and elected co-chair by his fellow commissioners. In June 2010, he was elected chairman of the ALBC's successor organization, The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, which he led through 2016. In his professional career, Holzer serves as the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. He retired in 2015 as Senior Vice President for Public Affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where for 23 years he was chief spokesman and held responsibility for government relations, admissions, visitor services, and multicultural audience development at the nation's largest art institution. He is now a Trustee of The Metropolitan Museum, representing the New York City Comptroller. From 2012 to 2015, Holzer served as well as a Roger Hertog Fellow at the New-York Historical Society. He was also a script consultant to the Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln, and wrote the official young readers' companion book to the movie.

In his work as a historian, Holzer has authored, co-authored, and edited 52 books, and contributed more than 550 articles to magazines and journals, plus chapters and forewords for 60 additional books. He is a frequent guest on television (C-SPAN, A&E, The History Channel, and PBS including on Bill Moyers Journal and 2009 Lincoln bicentennial-year documentaries on a variety of networks). He also lectures throughout the country, and has curated seven museum exhibitions, including three shows of Lincoln art at the former Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He served as chief historian for the exhibition "Lincoln and New York" at the New-York Historical Society, October 2009-March 2010 and "Lincoln and The Jews," March–June 2015, also at the New-York Historical Society. He also co-organized "The First Step to Freedom," a multi-city, sesquicentennial exhibition of Lincoln's original Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which debuted at the Schomburg Library in Harlem on September 22, 2012. He has performed, throughout the nation, stage programs entitled "Lincoln Seen and Heard," "The Lincoln Family Album," "Lincoln in American Memory," and "Grant Seen and Heard"—combining period pictures with authentic words—with such actors as Sam Waterston, Liam Neeson, Richard Dreyfuss, Stephen Lang, Holly Hunter, André De Shields, Anna Deaveare Smith, Annette Benning, Alec Baldwin, F. Murray Abraham, and Dianne Wiest. His most recent programs are "The Real Lincoln-Douglass Debates" with Norm Lewis and Stephen Lang, performed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and telecast on C-SPAN; and "Lincoln's Shakespeare" with Waterston, Lang, Kathleen Chalfant, Fritz Weaver, and John Douglas Thompson and performed in 2013 and 2014 at The Century Association and The Berkshire Playhouse. Holzer's programs have been staged at such venues as the White House, the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Lincoln Center in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Lincoln Association of Los Angeles, The Lincoln Forum at Gettysburg, Ford's Theatre, site of the Lincoln assassination, and the U.S. Capitol.