Frederick Douglass Book Prize

In partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, the Institute awards a $25,000 prize for an outstanding book published on the subject of slavery or abolition. The prize was first awarded in 1999 to Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan.

Publishers and authors are invited to submit books that meet these criteria. We are interested in all geographical areas and time periods. Nominations for books published in 2011 are now closed. Deadlines for books published in 2012 will be posted in the fall. To receive instructions on how to submit a book, please email gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu.

2011
Stephanie McCurry
Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press)

2010
Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff
In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press)

Siddharth Kara
Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (Columbia University Press)

2009
Annette Gordon-Reed
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W. W. Norton and Company)

2008
Stephanie E. Smallwood
Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Harvard University Press)

2007
Christopher Leslie Brown
Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press)

2006
Rebecca J. Scott
Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Harvard University Press)

2005
Laurent Dubois
A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (University of North Carolina Press)

2004
Jean Fagan Yellin
Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Basic Civitas Books)

2003
Seymour Drescher
The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford)

2002
Robert W. Harms
The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (Basic Books)

2001
David W. Blight
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press)

2000
David Eltis
The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge University Press)

1999
Ira Berlin
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard University Press)