Gabor Szappanos Boritt (born Róth-Szappanos Gábor; January 26, 1940 – February 2, 2026) was a Hungarian-born American historian and a leading scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War. He served as the Robert Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.
Early Life and Escape from Hungary
Boritt was born to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, at the onset of World War II. During the Nazi occupation, his family was confined to a single room in a hospital on the edge of the ghetto. His father participated in resistance activities; his grandfather's family was deported and murdered at Auschwitz. After the war, Boritt's mother died, his father and brother were imprisoned, and he was placed in an orphanage.
In 1956, at age sixteen, Boritt joined the Hungarian Revolution against Soviet control. After the uprising was crushed by Soviet forces, he and his sister Judith fled on foot across the Austrian border. Following several months in an Austrian refugee camp, he emigrated to the United States in 1957 with one dollar in his possession.
Education and Career
Arriving in New York City, Boritt was advised to "go west" and settled in South Dakota. He changed his surname to Boritt upon arrival in America, retaining "Szappanos" as his middle name. Seeking to learn English, he obtained a free booklet of Abraham Lincoln's writings, which inspired his lifelong scholarly focus. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Yankton College (1962), a Master's degree from the University of South Dakota (1963), and a Ph.D. from Boston University (1968).
He later taught at the University of Michigan before joining Gettysburg College in 1981, where he founded the Civil War Institute. The institution created for him the first fully endowed chair for Civil War studies in the United States.
Scholarly Contributions
Boritt wrote, co-wrote, or edited sixteen books on Lincoln and the Civil War. His first book, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (1978), placed what he termed "the right to rise" at the center of Lincoln's worldview. A 1995 survey by Civil War Times listed it among the ten most important books ever written about Lincoln. His later work The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows (2006) was described as "fascinating" by The New York Times.
Alongside Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman, Boritt helped establish the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Lincoln Prize, a $50,000 annual award for scholarship on the American Civil War.
Honors and Recognition
In September 2008, Boritt led President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush on a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield. On November 17, 2008, President Bush awarded him the National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, citing "a distinguished career of scholarship on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era." Boritt was also inducted as a Laureate of the Lincoln Academy of Illinois and received the Order of Lincoln, the state's highest honor, in 2009. He received the Lincoln Forum's Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement in 1996.
Boritt served on the boards of the Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by Congress.
Personal Life and Death
Boritt and his wife Liz lived in an 18th-century farmhouse on the edge of the Gettysburg battlefield, which had served both as a stop on the Underground Railroad and as a Confederate hospital. They raised three sons: Beowulf Boritt (a Tony Award-winning set designer), Jake Boritt (a filmmaker who directed the documentary Budapest to Gettysburg about his father's life), and Daniel Boritt (a biologist). Boritt died in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, from complications of dementia on February 2, 2026, at the age of 86.
