Gilder Lehrman Center | Frederick Douglass Prize

FREDERICK DOUGLASS BOOK PRIZE

Each year the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition presents the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, an annual award for the most outstanding nonfiction book in English on the subject of slavery and/or abolition and antislavery movements. Publishers and authors are invited to submit books that meet these criteria. We are interested in all geographical areas and time periods. Please note, however, that works related to the Civil War are acceptable only if their primary focus relates to slavery or emancipation.

Nominations for books copyrighted in 2013 are now being accepted. The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2014. To receive instructions on how to submit a book, please contact the Gilder Lehrman Center, MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, at 230 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511, fax (203) 432-6943, or e-mail to gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu.

Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winners

2013 Sydney Nathans To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker

2012 James Sweet Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World

2011 Stephanie McCurry Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

2010 Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World
Siddharth Kara Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery

2009 Annette Gordon-Reed The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

2008 Stephanie E. Smallwood Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

2007 Christopher Leslie Brown Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism

2006 Rebecca J. Scott Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery

2005 Laurent Dubois A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean

2004 Jean Fagan Yellin Harriet Jacobs: A Life

2003 First Prize: Seymour Drescher The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation
Second Prize: James F. Brooks Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands

2002 Robert Harms The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade
John Stauffer The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race

2001 David Blight Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

2000 David Eltis The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas

1999 First Prize: Ira Berlin Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery
Second Prize: Philip D. Morgan Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry