second Frederick Douglass Prize
David Eltis' study, "The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas," has won the second annual $25,000 Frederick Douglass Prize for the year's most outstanding book on slavery, resistance, or abolition.
The award -- the most generous in this field of study -- was presented at a banquet at the Yale Club in New York City on Sept. 26.
The winning book, published by Cambridge University Press, explores the English Atlantic slave system between 1650 and 1850, arguing that a detailed examination of the transatlantic slave trade demonstrates the strength of African resistance, rather than African weakness. The study also attempts to determine why nations that claimed the strongest commitment to individual freedom nonetheless created the most exploitative slave system in world history.
"This work fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the origins and development of African slavery in the New World," comments Yale historian David Brion Davis, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, which administers the prize. "It gives us a wholly new view of African resistance to enslavement, as well as the agency of Africans in shaping their destinies."
Widely recognized as one of the leading scholars of the African diaspora, Eltis is professor of history at Queens University in Ontario, Canada, an associate of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and a research lecturer at the University of Hull, England.
The Frederick Douglass Prize was established last year to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments. The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the onetime slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers and orators of the 19th century. The $25,000 cash award is accompanied by a cast bronze medallion featuring Douglass' portrait in relief.
The prize is endowed by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, collectors with a long record of encouraging and recognizing the study of American history.
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition was launched at Yale in November 1998 through a donation by the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History. Its mission is to promote the study of all aspects of the Atlantic slave system, including African and African-American resistance to enslavement, abolitionist movements, and the ways in which chattel slavery finally became outlawed.
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