The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library has chosen five finalists for the inaugural Harriet Tubman Prize. The award recognizes the best book of the year on slavery, the slave trade, or anti-slavery topics. The winner will be announced in November.
Sylviane A. Diouf, director of the Lapidus Center stated that “there is a new interest in slavery in film, television, and fiction, but the fantastic scholarship that undergirds it all is much less known although it has been around for many years. The Harriet Tubman Prize and the scholars’ conversations we offer are meant to help bring this history to a larger public.”
The five books that are finalists for the award are:
  From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Rio de la Plata by Alex Borucki (University of New Mexico Press) |
  Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844 by Aisha K. Finch (University of North Carolina Press) |
  Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret (Louisiana State University Press) |
  Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1875 by Patrick Rael (The University of Georgia Press) |
  The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn (Yale University Press) |
