By Jon Mooallem

Gabor Boritt, one of America's pre-eminent scholars of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, lived in Gettysburg, Pa., for 43 years, and often leapt at the opportunity to give tours of the famous battlefield near his home.

"To me, it's the most peaceful place on earth," he said, "in spite of it being [where] the bloodiest battle of American history took place."

Boritt's guests ranged from President George W. Bush to gaggles of fidgety schoolchildren on field trips, and he had a way of transmitting to all of them both his deep understanding of the site and his almost childlike exuberance for it.

"He's the guy who knows the whole story," said filmmaker Ken Burns, who made numerous visits to Gettysburg with Boritt and became a friend. "To walk around with him, you revel in his stories, you revel in his interpretations. He made the landscape come alive."

Karl Rove, who as senior adviser to President Bush organized a tour with Boritt for senior White House staff members and their families early in Bush's first term, recalled Boritt leading their group, step by step, on the path of Pickett's Charge during the battle of Gettysburg: "And Gabor says, 'I'm going to tell you, as we walk along, how many of you are being killed.' "

Boritt proceeded to describe each grisly twist of the battle unfolding spectrally around them. "We'd crest a high ridge, and he would say, 'OK, you two: you're dead,' " Rove said. "By the time we got to the High Water Mark of the Confederacy [the area of the battle's turning point], three people are left alive out of our group of 15."

Crucially, Rove went on, Boritt helped them inhabit that history through the eyes of its combatants on both sides -- young men, many of them still teenagers. And it wasn't lost on Rove that the spindly, excitable man narrating that story for them in a thick Hungarian accent "was once a 16-year-old picking up paving blocks and heaving them at Soviet tanks."

Boritt, a Hungarian refugee who became an influential historian of two archetypical American subjects -- Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War -- died on Feb. 2 in Chambersburg, Pa. He was 86.

A janitor's closet

Boritt was born Gabor Roth-Szappanos on Jan. 26, 1940, in Budapest, Hungary, the youngest of three children to Rozsa and Pal Roth-Szappanos. Forced from their home in the countryside as Hungary fell under fascist rule, then further displaced when the Nazis arrived in 1944, the family moved into a janitor's closet at a makeshift hospital in Budapest's Jewish ghetto, sheltering there alongside other Jews for the duration of World War II.

After the war, his mother, whose family had been murdered in Auschwitz, grew ill and died. It was 1948; Boritt was 8. Hungary was being overtaken by an authoritarian, Communist regime, which would soon imprison both Boritt's father and brother, shunting him into an orphanage for a time. Boritt would later describe "the death of my mother and the death of a dream that my father had of a better country, a better society" as simultaneous shocks. "So there are two deaths," he said.

He was 16 when the Hungarian Revolution erupted in October 1956, and he joined a crowd in Stalin Square laboring to tear down a colossal statue of the Soviet leader. (Boritt recalled going off to find some heavy ropes to pull it down and missing the moment the sculpture finally toppled.) For the first time, he imagined a future in which he might actually go to college -- a future in which he was free. But days later, Soviet tanks arrived and squashed the uprising at once.

Boritt and his older sister, Judy, fled through the woods on foot, eventually reaching Vienna, where his priority, he later explained, was to taste Coca-Cola. He didn't like it -- too sweet. "It was the great disappointment of my life," he said.

He immigrated to New York City with Judy in 1957, part of an emergency program by the Eisenhower administration that welcomed nearly 40,000 Hungarian refugees to America. Boritt had a single U.S. dollar bill in his pocket, he said later. He got a job at a hat factory.

He'd been told the real America could be found out west. But apparently no one said where exactly, because Boritt soon set out for Yankton, S.D., where he graduated from the now-defunct Yankton College in 1962. He completed his master's degree at the University of South Dakota the following year and earned a Ph.D. from Boston University in 1968.

Shortly after arriving in Yankton, in 1959, Boritt sent away for a pamphlet of Lincoln's speeches, published to celebrate Lincoln's 150th birthday that year. The booklet was free, and Boritt was trying to teach himself English.

He knew nothing about Abraham Lincoln, and not much about America either. But he was moved so deeply by what he was reading -- so enthralled by the man's articulation of that nation's ideals -- that he'd devote the rest of his life to studying them both.

A Civil War renaissance

Boritt's first book, 1978's "Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream," praised as "pathbreaking" in The Wall Street Journal, argued that a key to understanding Lincoln was his conviction, fundamentally more economic than moral, that all men must be furnished with an opportunity to improve their lives and benefit from their own labor -- "the right to rise," as Boritt termed it. This included enslaved Black men, the value of whose labor was being stolen.

Boritt would write, co-author or edit 15 other books about Lincoln or the Civil War, including "The Historian's Lincoln" and "The Gettysburg Gospel." His influence extended beyond his published work. After joining the faculty of Gettysburg College in 1981, where he would teach until his retirement in 2009, he founded the school's Civil War Institute; established with two colleagues the prestigious, $50,000 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize; and organized frequent gatherings at his home for historians from around the country. Over time, colleagues and former students became friends; some called themselves the "FOG Society": Friends of Gabor.

In 2008, he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House.

Lincoln had fallen out of fashion among historians when Boritt began publishing in the 1970s. He speculated that scholars and Americans in general were too disheartened by Vietnam to want to contemplate a traumatic rupture like the Civil War.

But Boritt's work, and his optimistic sensibility, helped bring about a renaissance for the field. Even by closely examining "that extraordinary moment of near national suicide," Burns explained, Boritt "absorbed and inhabited the sense of promise of the United States.... He had experienced things which many in the United States had never experienced, and so he was one of those guideposts who, just by his very being, his very presence, reminded us of things we often take for granted."

'Sick of this Nazi business'

In 1968, Boritt married Elizabeth Lincoln Norseen (the "Lincoln" is pure coincidence), who survives him, as do their three sons. For four decades, the Boritts lived on an 18th-century farm in Gettysburg that had once served as a stop on the Underground Railroad and an ad hoc hospital during the battle., who survives him, as do their three sons. For four decades, they lived on an 18th-century farm in Gettysburg that had once served as a stop on the Underground Railroad and an ad hoc hospital during the battle.

In 2007, one of their sons, filmmaker Jake Boritt, made a biographical documentary about his father, "Budapest to Gettysburg," in which the renowned historian repeatedly resists discussing his own history.

In one scene, returning to the hospital closet in Budapest with his sister, Judy, Boritt grows increasingly impatient as Judy describes the bloodstained floors and other atrocious conditions of their refuge during the war. Finally, he blurts: "I'm just so sick of this Nazi business."

Judy, it turns out, has become a psychiatrist -- as inclined toward introspection as Boritt was averse. "These people believe that you take the scab off of a wound and take it off again and again until something miraculous happens," Boritt grumbles to the camera. "I happen to think that that's self-defeating and it doesn't do any good."

His view was, he was an American now, living an American life, with his family and his pickup truck and his dogs: "I created myself a new identity, in which I'm very comfortable," he explained.

Of course, Boritt had devoted much of that life, as a historian, to picking at one of the gnarliest scabs in American history. But its resolution was altogether different, and more hopeful, than the story he fled. "My dad would say he came out of the worst failures in human history -- Hitler and Stalin," Jake Boritt explained. "They were demagogues whose fascist and Communist ideologies led to violence and mass murder and ripped away people's freedoms. For him, Lincoln was a heroic counterexample: how government can free people. It can create freedom too."

Write to Jon Mooallem at jon.mooallem@wsj.com.

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February 12, 2026 09:30 ET (14:30 GMT)

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