classes and replacing the study of American history with social studies classes," Lehrman said in a newspaper interview. "In many American colleges today you can graduate with a degree without ever taking a full course in American history. I respect the fact that this is a free country... but I do not regard the ignorance of American history as a good thing." In a 2008 interview with Humanities magazine, Lehrman described the efforts he had begun with Gilder: "[W]e want history to be a public thing. Which is why Dick and I, working with Gabor Boritt, established the Lincoln Prize for the very best work on the era of Mr. Lincoln and the Civil War and, with David Davis, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the very best work on abolition, resistance, and slavery. We want to help attract the interest of the general public. And scholars and teachers should be honored for the immense effort they make to write and to study and to teach American history." The first prize was "announced on Feb. 12, 1991, the 182d anniversary of Lincoln's birth, with subsequent prizes announced every year on his birthday eve, Feb. 11." The first Lincoln Prize recipient was film-maker Ken Burns for his Civil War series on PBS. Subsequent winners have included historians Michael Burlingame, Richard J. Carwardine, David H. Donald, Eric Foner, John Hope Franklin, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Allen C. Guelzo, James McPherson, James Oakes, and Douglas L. Wilson. Because of their conservative credentials, the support of Lehrman and Gilder for history projects was sometimes controversial. In 2005, David Brion Davis, a self-described "leftish Democrat" who worked with them on the Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition defended them: "Despite our major political differences, I have never encountered even the most subtle attempt at ideological influence of any kind with respect to my teaching, writing, cocurating a national exhibition on slavery, or making proposals as a member of the Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History." In 2013, Lehrman published The American Founders, a collection of essays on the military and civilian leaders of the Revolutionary War era. Recently, in 2017 and 2018, Lehrman published Churchill, Roosevelt & Company: Studies in Character and Statecraft, a book that examines how the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain cemented the alliance that won the war,