The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition has announced that the fourth annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize will be awarded to Yale history professor Robert Harms and to Yale alumnus and Harvard professor John Stauffer.
The $25,000 annual award for the year's best non-fiction books on slavery, resistance or abolition is the most generous history prize in the field and among the most respected awards for the study of the black experience.
Harms, chair of the African Studies Council at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and professor of history at Yale, will be awarded first prize and $15,000 for "The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade" (Basic Books). Drawing upon the private journal of First Lieutenant Robert Durand, Harms recreates the macabre journey of a French slave ship. The result is a detailed look at a single voyage that sheds new light on the multinational character of the slave trade and how it shaped morality, politics and economics on three continents. In addition to the cash prize, Harms will receive a bronze medallion with the likeness of Frederick Douglass.
The second prize will be awarded to Stauffer, associate professor of English and American civilization at Harvard University, for "The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race" (Harvard University Press). Stauffer's book, a study of the interconnected lives of four antislavery figures in the decade before the Civil War, explores both the possibilities and the limits of interracial friendship and the ominous dynamics of an abolitionist movement spiraling toward violence. Stauffer, who will be awarded $10,000 and a Douglass Prize medallion, received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1998.
"Both of these remarkable contributions to the literature of slavery and abolition break new ground," say Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman, who endow the prize. "They successfully expand our understanding of two very different, very intriguing subjects: the broad conspiracy of slave trading, and the narrow but fascinating possibilities for interracial friendships and collaborations in the era before the Civil War."
David Brion Davis, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, adds, "Robert Harms combines extraordinary research and historical scholarship with the traits of a first-class novelist. As a result, 'The Diligent' illuminates the nature of the appalling Atlantic slave trade as no other book, whether history or fiction, has succeeded in doing. Harms brings to life real people and shocking events, while also giving us an overview of the greatest forced migration in human history." Speaking of "Black Hearts of Men," Davis says, "This extremely original, powerful and brilliant study is surely one of the best books ever written on American abolitionists, both black and white."
This year's winning books were selected from a field of over 30 entries by a jury of historians: Stanley Engerman, jury chair, from the University of Rochester, Seymour Drescher from the University of Pittsburgh and Jennifer Baszile from Yale. The prizes will be awarded at a gala dinner at the Yale Club of New York on Feb. 27, 2003, as the capstone of Black History Month.
The book prize is named for Frederick Douglass (18181895), the slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers and orators of the 19th century. Previous winners were Ira Berlin, for "Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery" and Philip D. Morgan for "Slave Counterpoint: The Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry" (1999); David Eltis for "The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas" (2000); and David Blight for "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory" (2001).
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition was launched at Yale in 1998 through a generous donation by the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History. Its mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery, including African and African-American resistance to enslavement, abolitionist movements and the ways in which chattel slavery finally became outlawed.
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