Award Recipients

2023

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel is a technology entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded PayPal and Palantir, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and has funded companies like LinkedIn and Yelp. Peter also started the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking. In 2010, he founded the Thiel Fellowship, which annually provides twenty people under 23 $100,000 to leave college and devote themselves to the betterment of society and personal fulfilment.

2022

Larry P. Arnn

Larry P. Arnn is the twelfth president of Hillsdale College. He received his B.A. in 1974 from Arkansas State University, graduating with the highest distinction. He received his M.A. in Government in 1976 and his Ph.D. in Government in 1985 from the Claremont Graduate School. He also studied in England from 1977 to 1980, first as a research student in International History at the London School of Economics, and then in Modern History at Worcester College, Oxford University. While in England, he also served as director of research for the late Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill. He returned to the United States in 1980 to become an editor for Public Research, Syndicated, and from 1985-2000 he served as president of the Claremont Institute, an education and research institution based in Southern California. While at Claremont, he was the founding chairman of the California Civil Rights Initiative, which was passed by California voters in 1996 and prohibited racial preferences in state hiring, contracting, and admissions.

2020

Conrad Black

Conrad Black is a financier and author and columnist in a large number of publications in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, including the National Post, National Review Online, American Greatness, and The New Criterion. He is the author of biographies of Maurice Duplessis, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard M. Nixon, a strategic history of the United States (Flight of the Eagle), and Rise to Greatness: the History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present. His most recent books are Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other and The Canadian Manifesto. He was the publisher of the London Telegraph newspapers and The Spectator from 1987 to 2004 and controlled many other newspapers including the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, and the National Post, which he founded. He is the active honorary chairman of Conrad Black Capital Corporation, has been a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour since 2001, and is a Knight of the Holy See.

2019

Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts is the bestselling author of The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945, Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble and Napoleon: A Life, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and a finalist for the Plutarch Award. He has won many other prizes, including the Wolfson History Prize, the Bradley Prize, and the British Army Military Book of the Year. His latest book is Churchill: Walking with Destiny (Viking).

2018

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he focuses on classics and military history.

2017

Philippe de Montebello

During his more than thirty years as Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello worked tirelessly to preserve the very best of our cultural patrimony. His deep understanding of and respect for the grand Western humanist tradition helped to secure the Met’s standing as a beacon of civilization and to ensure that generations present and future will be able to appreciate our common artistic heritage.

2016

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the Founder of the AHA Foundation, a Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of Infidel (Free Press) and Heretic (Harper).


2015

Charles Murray

Charles Alan Murray is an American libertarian conservative political scientist, author, and columnist. His book Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (1984), which discussed the American welfare system, was widely read and discussed, and influenced subsequent government policy.


2014

Donald Kagan

Donald Kagan (1932–2021) was an American historian and classicist at Yale University specializing in ancient Greece, notable for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War. He also taught in the Department of History at Cornell University. Dr. Kagan was considered among the foremost American scholars of Greek history.


2012

Henry A. Kissinger

Henry A. Kissinger (1923–2023) was sworn in on September 22, 1973, as the 56th Secretary of State, a position he held until January 20, 1977. He also served as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs from January 20, 1969, until November 3, 1975. Dr. Kissinger was the Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm.