 
Winners of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize receive $25,000 and a cast bronze medallion featuring Douglass' portrait in relief. |
third annual Douglass Prize
David Blight's "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory" has won the third annual $25,000 Frederick Douglass Prize for the year's most outstanding book on slavery, resistance and/or abolition.
Blight will discuss his prize-winning work during a visit to the Yale campus on Tuesday, Nov. 27. The talk will take place at 6 p.m. in the auditorium of Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave. There will be a reception beforehand at 5:30 p.m. All are welcome to attend.
The Frederick Douglass Prize was established two years ago to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments. It is administered by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. The prize is endowed by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, pre-eminent collectors with a long record of encouraging, recognizing and supporting the study of American history.
The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the one-time slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers and orators of the 19th century. The cash award is accompanied by a cast bronze medallion featuring Douglass' portrait in relief. The award -- the most generous in this field of study -- will be formally presented at a banquet at the Yale Club on Thursday, Feb. 7.
"Race and Reunion" explores how the nation achieved sectional harmony by re-inventing wartime memory -- ignoring the role of slavery and race and instead celebrating the common valor and shared glory of white Union and Confederate soldiers in the name of healing the sectional divide. Blight shows how the moral imperative for the Civil War -- the destruction of slavery -- was downplayed, and how myths of the "Lost Cause" and the "Old South," still thriving today, grew in both literature and popular memory.
"'Race and Reunion' is a highly original examination of the terrible costs, in terms of racial exclusion and discrimination, that our nation paid for sectional reunion and reconciliation in the half-century following the Civil War," said David Brion Davis, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center and professor of history. "This magnificent work will be a historical landmark for decades to come."
Blight is the Class of 1959 Professor of History and Black Studies at Amherst College. He is also the author of "Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee" (1989), an intellectual biography that probes the meaning of the war in Douglass' life and thought. Blight also edited and wrote the introductions to five books, including "When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster" (1992); "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave" (1993); and "Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator" (1997), a re-issue of the book of oratory and anti-slavery writings that Douglass discovered as a youth. Blight has also written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African-American intellectual and cultural history.
The Gilder Lehrman Center will also honor with special recognition "The Slaveholding Republic" (Oxford University Press, 2001) by the late historian Don E. Fehrenbacher. His posthumously published work traces the impact of slavery on American government from the Revolution to the end of the Civil War.
Fehrenbacher, who died in 1997, was the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, where he taught for 30 years. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for "The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics," and he edited and completed David M. Potter's "The Impending Crisis," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977. He was awarded the Logan Hay Medal in 1989, and the Lincoln Prize for lifetime achievement in 1997. Ward M. McAfee, who completed "The Slaveholding Republic" after Fehrenbacher's death, is professor of history at California State University, San Bernardino, and one of Fehrenbacher's former students.
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