David W. Blight annouced as a winner of the 2019 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy

Columbia University Libraries has announced that two acclaimed works will be awarded the 2019 Bancroft Prizes in American History and Diplomacy: Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight (Simon & Schuster, 2018) and Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War by Lisa Brooks (Yale University Press, 2018).

Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass is a monumental achievement and awe-inspiring example of the historian’s craft. The book offers a definitive portrait of Douglass as a man and a prophet, in all his fullness and imperfection, intellectual gifts, and emotional needs: self-made and scarred, loving and distant, defensive and proud, a thinker, searcher, fighter, leader, and visionary, the conscience of the century. At once admiring and revealing, Blight’s writing allows us to see the person whole, in all his human complexity and genius.

In Our Beloved Kin, her immersive account of the oft-studied colonial American conflict known as King Philip’s War, Brooks imaginatively illuminates submerged indigenous histories. Written with an experimental and imagistic beauty that resists the closure of more traditionally styled narrative histories, Our Beloved Kin draws readers into a spinning, complex, changing world of tensions, alliances, and betrayals centered on bids for land. Brooks approaches a daunting task – retelling a pivotal event that shaped an era – with an uncommon boldness, creativity, and spirit of collaboration.