The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the Yale University MacMillan Center has announced three finalists for the 19th annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, this annual prize of $25,000 recognizes the best book on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition published in the preceding year.
Two of the finalists are women: Rashauna Johnson for Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge University Press); and Manisha Sinha for The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press).
Rashauna Johnson is an associate professor of history at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Dr. Johnson is a summa cum laude graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C. She earned a Ph.D. at New York University. The book prize jury stated that “Johnson’s contribution to the historiography of slavery expands our understanding of the global dimensions of an important trading center though the eyes of those most affected, the enslaved.”
Manisha Sinha is a native of India. She holds the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. The book prize jury stated that “Sinha tells the story of an effort that was interracial in constitution and international in scope. In Sinha’s study, the fight to end slavery in the United States is a more cohesive movement than previously recognized and a pivotal part of the history of human rights.” Dr. Sinha is the author of several other books including The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000). She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
The winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize will be announced this fall and the presentation made in New York City on February 22, 2018.