| New Haven,
Conn.— Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman
Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition,
sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American
History, has announced the finalists for the Tenth Annual
Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted
awards for the study of the African-American experience.
The finalists are: Anthony E. Kaye for Joining
Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (University
of North Carolina Press); Kristin Mann for Slavery
and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900
(Indiana University Press); Chandra Manning for What
this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the
Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers); and Stephanie
E. Smallwood for Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage
from Africa to American Diaspora (Harvard University
Press).
The $25,000 annual award for the year’s best
non-fiction book on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition
is the most generous history prize in its field. The
prize winner will be announced following the Douglass
Prize Review Committee meeting in September, and the
award will be presented at a dinner at the Yale Club
of New York on February 19, 2009.
This year’s finalists were selected from a field
of seventy five entries by a jury of scholars that included
Anthony Bogues (Brown University), Christopher Clark
(University of Connecticut), and Rebecca J. Scott (University
of Michigan).
The Frederick Douglass Prize was established in 1999
to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding
accomplishments. Previous winners are Ira Berlin and
Philip D. Morgan in 1999; David Eltis, 2000; David Blight,
2001; Robert Harms and John Stauffer, 2002; James F.
Brooks and Seymour Drescher, 2003; Jean Fagan Yellin,
2004; Laurent Dubois, 2005; Rebecca J. Scott, 2006,
and Christopher Leslie Brown, 2007.
The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818–1895),
the one-time slave who escaped bondage to emerge as
one of the great American abolitionists, reformers,
writers, and orators of the nineteenth century.
Anthony E. Kaye’s book Joining Places: Slave
Neighborhoods in the Old South offers a new approach
to familiar questions about the character of slave society
and community. Adopting from slaves’ and ex-slaves’
own accounts the concept of the “neighborhood”
as a key to the organization of their lives, Kaye traces
the influences of geographical propinquity and distance
on the North American slave experience. Drawing particularly
on evidence contained in federal pension records as
yet little used by historians, Joining Places
demonstrates how “neighborhood” shaped slaves’
work and socialization, their creation of marriage and
family ties, and the resistance they offered to slaveholders
and the slave regime.
The fruit of deep immersion in archival and oral sources,
Kristin Mann’s Slavery and the Birth of an
African City is an impressive study of the ways
slavery was entwined with the early growth of one of
Africa’s most important cities. Lagos, though
a relative latecomer to the Atlantic slave trade, was
sufficiently involved in it that its merchants continued
an illegal international traffic in slaves after 1807,
so courting British attention and determination to suppress
this. This book makes West African history relevant
and accessible to scholars in other fields, and will
be read by all interested in the history of slavery
and the Atlantic world.
In case we imagined that there was nothing more to
say about that old question, “what had slavery
to do with the American Civil War?” Chandra Manning
shows that we were wrong. Her lively, readable book
What this Cruel War was Over makes a striking
argument that slavery was very much to do with the war,
and that this was so throughout the conflict. Her subjects
are the ordinary soldiers who fought; her sources include
their letters and diaries, and their writings in regimental
newspapers, many of which Manning discovered and uses
for the first time. By tracing attitudes towards slavery
among those who actually fought, What this Cruel
War was Over provides a model study of “history
from below”, and ought finally to lay the ghost
of the view that the Civil War was not about slavery.
Saltwater Slavery is a remarkable account
of the transatlantic slave trade that will lead scholars
to rethink their understanding of the “middle
passage,” Africa’s diaspora, and the relationships
between Africa and the New World. Stephanie Smallwood
uses records of the English Royal African Company’s
trade with the Gold Coast to provide insights into the
lives of the men and women the company bought, transported,
and offered for sale in the Americas. Tracing the steps
that led from captivity in Africa to final sale in the
New World, Smallwood gets behind the generalities that
often characterize studies of the slave trade. Deploying
slaves’ own metaphor of “saltwater slavery”
to illuminate the meanings of the Atlantic slave system,
Stephanie Smallwood opens up new avenues for historians
and anthropologists to explore. This is a subtle, powerful
study of the deep horrors of slavery and the slave trade.
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery,
Resistance and Abolition, a part of The Whitney and
Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies
at Yale University, was launched in November 1998 through
a generous donation by philanthropists Richard Gilder
and Lewis Lehrman and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of
American History. Its mission is to promote the study
of all aspects of slavery, especially the chattel slave
system and its destruction. The Center seeks to foster
an improved understanding of the role of slavery, slave
resistance, and abolition in the founding of the modern
world by promoting interaction and exchange between
scholars, teachers, and public historians through publications,
educational outreach, and other programs and events.
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.
For further information on events and programming,
contact the center by phone (203) 432-3339, fax (203)
432-6943, or e-mail gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu.
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