Lewis E. Lehrman was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. in History from Yale where he was a Carnegie Teaching Fellow, and his M.A. in History from Harvard while a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He is a former Chairman of the Committee on Humanities of the Yale University Council.
Mr. Lehrman is widely known for his run for Governor of New York in 1982 on both the Conservative and Republican Party lines, narrowly losing to Mario Cuomo. In 1983, he was the Archdiocese of New York’s Cardinal Cooke honoree for his early work developing scholarships for New York inner-city schools.
A former Senior Advisor and a Director of Morgan Stanley Asset Management, in 1988 he became a Managing Director of the firm. He is presently Senior Partner of L. E. Lehrman & Co., an investment firm he established in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Mr. Lehrman co-founded the Lincoln & Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College which annually awards the Lincoln Prize for the best work on the Lincoln era. (It is now the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize). There he taught the Lincoln Senior Seminar. He and his partner, Richard Gilder, established the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University which awards the Frederick Douglass Prize. With Washington College and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, they created the George Washington Book Prize.
Through their collection of original historical manuscripts and documents to teach American History from primary sources, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has developed its teaching program for high schools and colleges throughout America and England.
Messrs. Gilder and Lehrman were presented the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2005 for their work in American history. In November 2010, the duo received the William E. Simon Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Social Entrepreneurship for their work promoting the study of American history through the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Lehrman has been awarded Honorary Degrees from Babson College (Babson Park, MA), Gettysburg College (Gettysburg, PA), Lincoln College (Lincoln, IL), Marymount University (Arlington, VA) and Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, CA).
Mr. Lehrman has been a member of the Advisory Committee of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and the Lincoln Forum. In 2013, Lehrman was named a Distinguished Director of the Abraham Lincoln Association. He has been a trustee of the American Enterprise Institute, the Morgan Library, the Manhattan Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.
Lehrman has written and lectured widely on American history and economics and is the author of Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point (Stackpole Books, 2008), Churchill, Roosevelt & Company: Studies in Character and Statecraft (Stackpole Books, 2017), Lincoln & Churchill: Statesmen at War (Stackpole Books, 2018), The True Gold Standard (TLI, 2011, 2013), Money, Gold, and History (TLI, 2013), and Lincoln “by littles” (TLI, 2013). He is editor of the second edition of Money and the Coming World Order (TLI, 2012). He has written for publications such as Harper’s, the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Greenwich Time, the Harrisburg Patriot-News, the New York Sun, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator and Policy Review.
He and his wife Louise have five adult children, fifteen grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.