Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar who recently announced his retirement as a public affairs executive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been awarded the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, to be announced Thursday.

Mr. Holzer won for his book “Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion” (Simon & Schuster). He will receive $50,000 and a bronze replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s life-size bust “Lincoln the Man” in a ceremony April 23 in New York.

The prize is awarded by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History....