Mark E. Neely, Jr. is an American historian best known as an authority on the U.S. Civil War in general and Abraham Lincoln in particular. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. Neely was born in Amarillo, Texas. He earned his undergraduate degree in American Studies at Yale University in 1966 and his Ph.D. in history at the same school in 1973. Yale's Graduate School would award him with a Wilbur Cross Medal in 1995. From 1971 to 1972 Neely was a visiting instructor at Iowa State University. In the latter year, he was named director of The Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a position he held for twenty years. In 1992, Dr. Neely was named the John Francis Bannon Professor of History and American Studies at Saint Louis University. And, in 1998, he was made the McCabe Greer Professor of Civil War History at Pennsylvania State University. Neely is best known for his 1991 book The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, which won both the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bell I. Wiley Prize the following year. In March 1991, he published an article in the magazine Civil War History, entitled Was the Civil War a Total War?, which is considered one of the top three most influential articles on the war written in the last half of the 20th Century.

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