Born and raised in Hungary, he participated as a teenager in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet Union before escaping to America, where he received his higher education and became a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War.

The Nazis forced his family to live in a single room in a hospital on the ghetto's edge, where he played on bloodstained floors.

Days later, 3,000 Soviet tanks crushed those possibilities, and Boritt and his sister Judith headed for the Austrian border.

In darkness, they hiked through wooded hills before coming to a no man's land guarded by men in watchtowers with machine guns.

[2] He helped create the $50,000 Lincoln Prize, widely considered the most coveted award for the study of American history.

[4] Boritt served on the boards of the Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by Congress.

His book The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows (2006) was featured on the cover of U.S. News & World Report and called "fascinating" by The New York Times.

[7] His life story is the subject of a feature-length documentary film titled Budapest to Gettysburg (2007), directed by his son Jake Boritt.