The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University has announced the four finalists for the 20th annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize. All four of the authors selected as finalists are women who have teaching positions at U.S. colleges and universities.
The prize recognizes the best book on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition published in the preceding year. It comes with a $25,000 award. The winner of the prize will be announced this fall and be presented in a ceremony in New York City on February 28, 2019.
The finalists are:
* The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry (Beacon Press). Daina Ramey Berry is an associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies, and the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Fellow in History, at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Berry holds a bachelor’s degree in history, a master’s degree in African American studies and a Ph.D. in American studies, all from the University of California, Los Angeles.
* Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (Simon & Schuster). Erica Armstrong Dunbar is the Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Professor Dunbar is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
* Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade by Sharla M. Fett (University of North Carolina Press). Professor Fett is a professor of history and American studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of Carleton College in Northfeild, Minnesota. Professor Fett earned a master’s degree at Stanford University and a Ph.D. at Rutgers University
* The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits by Tiya Miles (The New Press). Tiya Miles is a professor at the University of Michigan in the departments of American culture, Afro-American and African studies, history, women’s studies, and in the Native American Studies Program. Dr. Miles is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in Afro-American studies. She earned a master’s degree in women’s studies from Emory University in Atlanta and a Ph.D. in American studies at the University of Minnesota.