Richard Gilder, co-founder of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, heads the brokerage firm Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co. The firm's specialty is trading leveraged stocks and shortselling. After working at the brokerage firm of A.G. Becker & Co., Gilder founded the firm now known as Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co. in 1968. He is Chairman of the Executive Committee at the New-York Historical Society and serves on the Executive Board of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, Morgan Library & Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the Central Park Conservancy, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. He is Chairman Emeritus of both, the conservative think-tank, the Manhattan Institute and the conservative political action committee, the Club for Growth. In 2005, Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman received the National Humanities Medal for their work promoting the study of American history. He has now set up a PhD. program at the American Museum of Natural History in his own name, the Richard Gilder Graduate School at AMNH.
Gilder attended Northfield Mount Hermon School before enrolling in Yale College. He received a Doctor of Humane Letters in 2007 from Yale. He provided over half the necessary funding for the recently completed Richard Gilder Boathouse for Yale rowers.
He married the former model and actress, Lois Chiles, in 1993. Her paternal uncle was the oil tycoon Eddie Chiles.
Famous quotes containing the words richard and/or gilder:
“Awop-bop-a-loo-mop alop-bam-boom!”
—Little Richard (b. 1932)
“Unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom empty, a limp nullity. While the female body is full of internal potentiality, the male is internally barren.... Manhood at the most basic level can be validated and expressed only in action.”
—George Gilder (b. 1939)