Author Colin Calloway Wins 2019 George Washington Prize 

Author and historian Colin Calloway has won the coveted George Washington Prize, including an award of $50,000, for his new book, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (Oxford). One of the nation’s largest and most prestigious literary awards, now in its fourteenth year, the George Washington Prize honors its namesake by recognizing the year’s best new books on the nation’s founding era, especially those that engage a broad public audience. 

Conferred by George Washington’s Mount Vernon, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Washington College, the award will be presented during a special event at the Union League Club in New York City on October 24. More information about the George Washington Prize is available at www.mountvernon.org/gwprize.

In The Indian World of George Washington, Colin Calloway tells the fascinating story of Washington’s lifelong engagement with Native America. The book paints a new and, at times, disturbing portrait of the nation’s first president—as an untested militia officer on the banks of the Ohio, as a diplomat who gradually learned to work with Indians on their own terms, and, during his final years, as a disappointed Indian land speculator. Unusual for a Washington biography, Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Cornplanter, Red Jacket, and Little Turtle, among many other native leaders, play leading roles in Calloway’s account. America’s first inhabitants, the book shows, were as central to the founding of the American republic as the nation’s first president.

Colin G. Calloway is John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History and Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. His previous books include Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History (Oxford, 2013) and The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army (Oxford, 2015). The Indian World of George Washington was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award.

The George Washington Prize event on October 24 will also honor the six finalists for the 2019 prize:

• Stephen Fried, Rush: Revolution, Madness, and the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father (Crown)
• Catherine Kerrison, Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America (Ballantine Books)
• Joyce Lee Malcolm, The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold: An American Life (Pegasus Books)
• Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (Viking)
• Russell Shorto, Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (Norton)
• Peter Stark, Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding Father (HarperCollins)