Justene Hill Edwards, associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, has won the 2025 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
Presented annually in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City, the $25,000 prize honors the best book written in English on the topics of slavery, resistance, or abolition published in the preceding year. Dr. Edwards was honored for her latest book, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (W.W. Norton and Company, 2024).
In an statement announcing the award, James G. Basker, president of the Gilder Lerhman Institute of American History, stated, “Rigorously researched and beautifully written, [Savings and Trust] tells a little remembered but deeply tragic story about a financial disaster that set Black people back for generations and compounded the wealth gap that still haunts our country today. It is a must-read for everyone who cares about economic history and racial equality.”
A University of Virginia faculty member since 2016, Dr. Edwards specializes in African American history, the history of American slavery, and the history of American capitalism. Her first book, Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (Columbia University Press, 2021), explores the economic lives of enslaved people, not as property or bonded laborers, but as active participants in their local economy.
Dr. Edwards received her bachelor’s degree in Spanish from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and her master’s degree in African new world studies from Florida International University. She earned a second master’s degree and a Ph.D. both in history from Princeton University.