Edwin Cole Bearss: 2017 Pritzker Military Museum & Library Founder’s Literature Award Recipient

Recipients of the Founder’s Literature Award are selected by the Museum and Library’s founder Colonel Jennifer N. Pritzker to receive this award for their immense contribution to furthering the public’s understanding of the citizen soldier and the military’s role in a democracy through a lifetime of writings about military history and affairs.

Edwin Cole Bearss is a WWII veteran, author, and renowned authority on the American Civil War. He is 50 plus year veteran of military and government service. He has published 19 books and contributed to numerous articles about the Civil War and WWII; including Fields of Honor: Pivotal Battles of the Civil War and Hardluck Ironclad: The Sinking and Salvage of the Cairo with James McPherson. During his career he has devoted much of his attention to battlefield preservation and interpretation.

Bearss joined the United States Marine Corps in 1942 and served in the Pacific Theater in WWII with the 3rd Marine Raider Battalion and 1st Marine Division in the invasion of Guadalcanal and New Britain.

He then attended Georgetown University where he received a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a M.A. in history from Indiana University.

Bearss began his career with the National Park Service in Vicksburg, Mississippi as Park Historian. His research there lead him and two friends to the long lost resting place of the Union gunboat Cairo and worked with the Department of the Interior to have it raised from the Yazoo River. Bearss would go on to serve a chief historian of the National Park Service and became widely known for his interpretative tours of Civil War battle sites. For his contributions to the National Park Services, Bearss was awarded the unique title of Chief Historian Emeritu

He has received a number of awards in the fields of history and preservation; including, the Harry S. Truman Award for Meritorious Service in the field of Civil War History and Department of the Interior Distinguished Service Award, among many others.

Bearss was a featured commentator in the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War.