New York, NY (February 22, 2008) — On February 21st, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, an organization sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, presented the Ninth Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize at a dinner at the Yale Club of New York. Christopher Leslie Brown, Visiting Professor of History at Columbia University, was awarded the prize for his book, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press). The book examines the origins of abolitionism in Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The $25,000 award for the year’s best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance, or abolition is the most generous history prize in the field. The dinner included remarks by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, co-founders of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, David Blight, Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, and David Brion Davis, Director Emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center.

Brown earned his undergraduate degree from Yale University, where he played on the football team. The recipient of a Rhodes scholarship, he received his D.Phil. from Balliol College at Oxford University before returning to the United States to work in the federal government during the Clinton administration. He has taught at Rutgers University. Moral Capital, his first book, also earned the 2006 Morris D. Forkosch Prize and the 2006 James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History from the American Historical Association.

The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field of slavery and abolition by honoring outstanding books. Previous winners include: Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, 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 slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers, and orators of the 19th century.

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, a part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, was launched at Yale in November 1998. Its mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery, in particular the chattel slave system, including African and African-American resistance to enslavement, abolitionist movements and the ways in which chattel slavery finally became outlawed.

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.

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