Book Prize Winners and Finalists Featured on Book Breaks in March

Since the summer of 2020, Gilder Lehrman Book Breaks has featured the most exciting history scholars in America discussing their books live with host William Roka followed by a Q&A with home audiences. This March, discussions range from Thomas Jefferson’s White and Black daughters to women’s roles in the Civil War, along with accounts of slavery in French Louisiana and the transition from Civil War to Reconstruction.

Featuring Lincoln Prize and National Humanities Medal winner Edward L. Ayers and the 2020 winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Sophie White, this month promises rich conversations with eminent historians.

On March 7 Edward L. Ayers discusses his book The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, which explores the crux of America’s history between the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world and the political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War, recounting the weeks and months after emancipation when Black and White residents of Staunton, Virginia, tested freedom while political leaders negotiated the terms of readmission to the Union.

Edward L. Ayers is the Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities at the University of Richmond, where he is president emeritus. He has been named National Professor of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama at the White House, served as president of the Organization of American Historians, and won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history.

Sunday, March 7 from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET (11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PT). Register here.

On March 14 Thavolia Glymph discusses her Lincoln Prize finalist book The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, a comprehensive new history of women’s roles and lives in the Civil War showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in the arenas of the military fight, wartime struggles on the home front, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. Glymph demonstrates how the Civil War exposed as never before the nation’s fault lines, not just along race and class lines but also along the ragged boundaries of gender.

Thavolia Glymph is professor of history and law at Duke University, faculty research scholar in the Duke Population Research Institute, and faculty affiliate in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Glymph is past president of the Southern Historical Association, an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, a member of the Scholarly Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Gettysburg Foundation Board of Directors.

Sunday, March 14 from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET (11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PT). Register here. 

On March 21 Sophie White discusses her book Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana, which focuses on four especially dramatic court cases that draw us into Louisiana’s courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.

Sophie White is professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and concurrent professor in the departments of Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies. She is the recipient of seven book prizes (and finalist for another two) for Voices of the Enslaved, and the recipient of the 2020 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

Sunday, March 21 from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET (11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PT). Register here.

On March 28 Catherine Kerrison discusses her George Washington Prize finalist book, Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America, which focuses on Thomas Jefferson’s daughters Martha and Maria by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and his daughter Harriet by the enslaved woman Sally Hemings. While Martha and Maria received a fine convent school education when they lived with their father during his diplomatic posting in Paris, Harriet escaped slavery—apparently with the assistance of Jefferson himself—and set off for a decidedly uncertain future, passing as a freeborn White woman.

Catherine Kerrison is a professor of history at Villanova University, where she teaches courses in colonial and Revolutionary America and women’s and gender history. Her second book, Jefferson’s Daughters won the Library of Virginia’s 2019 Literary Award for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the 2019 George Washington Prize.

Sunday, March 28 from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET (11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PT). Register here.

Learn more about all Book Breaks events here.

Find these and many other award-winning books on American history here.