| Mount Vernon,
VA — The fourth annual $50,000 George Washington
Book Prize, honoring the most important new book about
America's founding era, was awarded at Mount Vernon
on May 29 to Marcus Rediker for The Slave Ship:
A Human History (Viking, 2007). In this bicentennial
year of the abolition of the slave trade, Rediker—a
prize-winning author who chairs the history department
at the University of Pittsburgh—was honored for
his definitive and painfully evocative account of the
floating prisons that carried an estimated 12.4 million
Africans across the "Middle Passage" of the
Atlantic to help build the new America.
A social historian, Rediker's subject is not only the
ships—vessels of such terror they had to be outfitted
with special netting to prevent the desperate Africans
from throwing themselves overboard—but the kidnapped
Africans and their many individual histories and attempts
at resistance; the common sailors who were their prison
guards, tormentors and sometime fellow victims; and
the necessarily brutal ships' captains who were the
agents of a new global capitalism made possible by the
trade in human life.
"One of the things I wanted to do in this book
was to make our understanding of the slave trade concrete—hence,
my subtitle, 'a human history'—because I think
our capacity to live with injustice depends to some
extent on making it abstract," said Rediker, whose
fierce opposition to the death penalty was the inspiration
for The Slave Ship and its exploration of what
he describes as the historic connection between race
and terror. "The George Washington Book Prize is
a tremendous honor, and a surprise. I grew up in the
South, went to high school in Virginia, so George Washington
and the Virginia aristocracy always loomed large in
my mind. It's where I first came to understand issues
of race and class and I've been working on them ever
since."
Presented to Rediker at a black-tie dinner attended
by some 200 luminaries from the worlds of book publishing,
politics, journalism and academia, the George Washington
Book Prize includes a medal and $50,000—making
it one of the largest history awards in the country.
Complete with fireworks and candlelit tours of Washington's
Mansion, the Mount Vernon event also celebrated the
works of the two other finalists: Woody Holton for Unruly
Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill
and Wang) and Jon Latimer for 1812: War with America
(Belknap/Harvard). The books were selected by a three-person
jury of distinguished American historians, including
Robert L. Middlekauff of the University of California
at Berkeley, chair; Elizabeth A. Fenn of Duke University;
and Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, director of Monticello's
International Center for Jefferson Studies and professor
of history at the University of Virginia.
In their report on the winning entry, the jurors wrote
that "Rediker shares one quality with the demographers
who study the slave trade, he respects evidence and
uses it in the telling of slave history. But it is not
the numbers of people that interest him (though he reports
the horrifying figures demographers give on the extent
of the trade), it is the experience of these people.
His is a 'human history,' his book's subtitle that may
seem redundant, but isn't. Virtually every aspect of
the story of where the slaves were from, how they were
captured and imprisoned, transported to slave ships,
and their treatment on board is covered... Along the
way the reader learns much, not only about the slaves
but also about the men who owned the ships and ran them...
Rediker describes his book as 'painful'; it was surely
painful to write. Despite the emotional cost to its
author, it is beautifully written. Indeed the book is,
in its use of evidence and its determination to expose
the bleakness of the slave experience, evocative and
moving, and deeply instructive in unsuspected ways."
Rediker's book was named the winner by a panel of two
representatives from each of the three institutions
that created and sponsor the prize—Washington
College in Chestertown, Maryland; the Gilder Lehrman
Institute of American History in New York City; and
the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association—plus historian
Patricia Bonomi of New York University.
"For more than 200 years, Americans have been
engaged in an ongoing—and sometimes contentious—conversation
about the meaning and significance of our founding era,"
said Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold director
of Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study
of the American Experience, which administers the prize.
"The George Washington Book Prize honors books
that contribute fresh insights to that national conversation,
and that approach history as a literary art. Rediker's
book succeeds marvelously on both counts: it is a majestic,
even poetic book, profoundly moral but never moralistic,
and suffused with a sense of deep human sympathy."
"Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship is a
brilliant, exhaustive and deeply humane work of scholarship,
which, although it is a history that encompasses every
country in the Atlantic World, nonetheless shaped the
Founding Era in profound ways," said James G. Basker,
President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American
History. "The legacy of this history remains one
of our challenges in America today."
Created in 2005, the George Washington Book Prize was
awarded in its inaugural year to Ron Chernow for Alexander
Hamilton and in 2006 to Stacy Schiff for A
Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth
of America. This is the second time it has been
awarded for a book on the slave trade—last year
it went to Charles Rappleye for Sons of Providence:
The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American
Revolution.
About the Sponsors of the George Washington Book Prize
Washington College was founded in 1782, the first institution
of higher learning established in the new republic.
George Washington was not only a principal donor to
the college, but also a member of its original governing
board. He received an honorary degree from the college
in June 1789, two months after assuming the presidency.
The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American
Experience, founded in 2000, is an innovative center
for the study of history, culture and politics, and
fosters excellence in the art of written history through
fellowships, prizes, and student programs.
Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American
History promotes the study and love of American history.
The Institute serves teachers, students, scholars, and
the general public. It helps create history-centered
schools, organizes seminars and programs for educators,
produces print and electronic publications and traveling
exhibitions, sponsors lectures by eminent historians,
and administers a History Teacher of the Year Award
in every state through its partnership with Preserve
America. The Institute also conducts awards including
the Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington
Book Prizes, and offers fellowships for scholars to
work in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. The Institute
maintains two websites, www.gilderlehrman.org
and the quarterly online journal www.historynow.org.
With its new Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education
Center, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association has created
the equivalent of a presidential library for George
Washington. "We want to be the first place people
think of when they have a question about George Washington,"
noted James Rees, Mount Vernon's Executive Director.
"The George Washington Book Prize is an important
component in our aggressive outreach program to historians,
teachers, and students."
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