The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the Yale University MacMillan Center has announced the finalists for the 19th annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, this annual prize of $25,000 recognizes the best book on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition published in the preceding year.
The finalists are: Alfred L. Brophy for University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War (Oxford University Press); Rashauna Johnson for Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge University Press); and Manisha Sinha for The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press).
Only one of the three authors is an African American. Rashauna Johnson is an associate professor of history at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Dr. Johnson is a summa cum laude graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C. She earned a Ph.D. at New York University. The book prize jury stated that “Johnson’s contribution to the historiography of slavery expands our understanding of the global dimensions of an important trading center though the eyes of those most affected, the enslaved.”
The winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize will be announced this fall and the presentation made in New York City on February 22, 2018.
My cup runs over with reading lists; this said, I am hopeful to add Johnson’s book to my read, reviewed, and discussed list.
Congratulations to you.