New Haven, Conn.— Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, has announced the finalists for the Ninth Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African-American experience.
The finalists are: Christopher Brown for Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism ( University of North Carolina Press); Matt D. Childs for The1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery ( University of North Carolina Press); and Cassandra Pybus for Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Freedom (Beacon Press).
The $25,000 annual award for the year’s best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition is the most generous history prize in its field. The prize winner will be announced following the Douglass Prize Review Committee meeting in September, and the award will be presented at a dinner at the Yale Club of New York on February 21, 2008, as the capstone of Black History Month.
This year’s finalists were selected from a field of over seventy entries by a jury of scholars that included Laurent Dubois (Duke University), Leslie Harris (Emory University), and Stephanie McCurry (University of Pennsylvania).
The Frederick Douglass Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments. Previous winners were Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan in 1999; David Eltis, 2000; David Blight, 2001; Robert Harms and John Stauffer, 2002; James F. Brooks and Seymour Drescher, 2003; Jean Fagan Yellin, 2004; Laurent Dubois, 2005; and Rebecca J. Scott, 2006.
The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the one-time slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers,and orators of the nineteenth century.
Christopher Brown’s Moral Capital resets the terrain for understanding the origins and effectiveness of British efforts to end slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Neither moral objections nor economic advantage alone enabled the abolition of slavery in Great Britain, Brown argues. Rather, changes in the British Empire, and particularly the North American colonies’ challenge to British authority, provided the opportunity for antislavery activists to move against slavery, which they saw as a way to demonstrate the superior moral character of Great Britain. Moral Capital not only provides an important new argument about British anti-slavery, but also highlights the nature of the relationship between moral sensibility and political activism at any time.
In The Aponte Rebellion, Matt Childs braids together a detailed account of the Aponte conspiracy, which challenged Cuban slavery, with a careful study of the economy, society and institutions of early nineteenth century Cuba. He tells a riveting story of the organization and conceptualization of the revolt itself, detailing both the local networks and the pan-Caribbean and trans-Atlantic circulation of ideas out of which it emerged. In so doing, he paints a vivid picture of a society in transformation, and of individuals struggling to imagine a different political order. Childs’s work is a major contribution to the historiography on Cuba, Caribbean slavery, and antislavery activism in the Atlantic world.
In her book Epic Journeys of Freedom, Cassandra Pybus offers a compelling story of the American Revolution, about the African Americans who fled with the British at the end of the war, and about a determined quest for freedom which took them from North America to the farthest corners of the British Empire. Part detective story, part collective biography, Epic Journeys is an unstinting account of African Americans’ pursuit of the elusive principle of freedom.
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, a part of The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, was launched in November 1998 through a generous donation by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Its mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery, especially the chattel slave system and its destruction. The Center seeks to foster an improved understanding of the role of slavery, slave resistance, and abolition in the founding of the modern world by promoting interaction and exchange between scholars, teachers, and public historians through publications, educational outreach, and other programs and events.
Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History promotes the study and love of American history. The Institute serves teachers, students, scholars, and the general public. It helps create history-centered schools and academic research centers, organizes seminars and programs for educators, produces print and electronic publications and traveling exhibitions, sponsors lectures by eminent historians, and administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in every state through its partnership with Preserve America. The Institute also conducts awards including the Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Book Prizes, and offers fellowships for scholars to work in the Gilder Lehrman Collection and other archives.
The Institute maintains two websites, www.gilderlehrman.org and the quarterly online journal www.historynow.org.
For further information on events and programming, contact the center by phone (203) 432-3339, fax (203) 432-6943, or e-mail gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu.
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