| New Haven,
Conn.— Stephanie E. Smallwood, Associate Professor
of History at the University of Washington, Seattle,
has been selected as the winner of the 2008 Frederick
Douglass Book Prize, awarded for the best book written
in English on slavery or abolition. Smallwood won for
her book, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from
Africa to American Diaspora (Harvard University
Press). The book examines the transatlantic slave trade
and the relationships between Africa and the new world.
The prize is awarded by Yale University’s Gilder
Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance,
and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute
of American History.
In addition to Smallwood, the other finalists for the
prize were 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); and Chandra Manning for What
this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the
Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers). The $25,000
annual award is the most generous history prize in the
field. The prize will be presented to Smallwood at a
dinner in New York City in February 2009.
This year’s finalists were selected from a field
of over seventy-five entries by a jury of scholars that
included Barrymore Anthony Bogues (Brown University),
Christopher Clark (University of Connecticut), and Rebecca
J. Scott (University of Michigan School of Law). The
winner was selected by a review committee of representatives
from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery,
Resistance and Abolition, the Gilder Lehrman Institute
of American History, and Yale University.
“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,” says Clark,
the 2008 Douglass Prize Jury Chair and Professor of
History at the University of Connecticut. “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. She shows how at each stage captives
found themselves transformed and re-presented as commodities
– for purchase by merchants; for confinement aboard
ship; and for resale as plantation workers or servants.”
“Above all, Smallwood depicts the estrangement
that removed captives not only from the social and familial
circles of kinship, but also from the spiritual connections
with kin that could sustain a good life and a good death.
Slaves built new kinship networks to save themselves
from social death, but often their efforts were cut
off by resale or premature mortality. 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 Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in
1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field of slavery
and abolition by honoring outstanding books. Previous
winners were 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 slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the
great American abolitionists, reformers, writers, and
orators of the 19th century.
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.
For further information on Gilder Lehrman Center events
and programming, contact the center by phone (203) 432-3339,
fax (203) 432-6943, or e-mail gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu.
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.
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