Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 7, 2003|Volume 32, Number 10

Two books on slavery are
winners of the Douglass Prize

A major study on the British anti-slavery campaign took first place in the 2003 Frederick Douglass Book Prize competition sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

Second prize went to an innovative book on slavery in the Southwest Borderlands.

The annual award honors the year's best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance and/or abolition.

Seymour Drescher, the University Professor of History at the University of Pittsburg, won the $20,000 first prize for his book "The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation" (Oxford). Drescher's book explores the debate over slavery and free labor within Britain, focusing on the centrality of arguments made by scholars and politicians who were prominent in the emerging social sciences. Drescher shows how the abolition of slavery became, for them, an experiment that would test scientific principles, even while the actual move to abolish slavery was driven by politics rather than scientific research.

"Seymour Drescher's remarkable book demonstrates his mastery of the new social science of the anti-slavery era, his command of the many anti-slavery motivations and his comprehensive grasp of the decisive cause of its success," commented Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman, the philanthropists who endow the Frederick Douglass Prize.

James F. Brooks received the $5,000 second prize for "Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands" (University of North Carolina Press). Brooks' work explores the origins and legacies of a flourishing captive exchange economy within and among native American and Euramerican communities throughout the Southwest Borderlands from the Spanish colonial era to the end of the 19th century.

Two other books were singled out for honorable mention: "In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863" by Leslie M. Harris (University of Chicago Press) and "Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North" by Patrick Rael.

This year's winning books were selected from a field of nearly 50 entries by a jury of scholars chaired by David W. Blight, professor of history and African American studies at Yale. The prizes will be awarded at a gala dinner at the Yale Club of New York on Feb. 26 as the capstone of the Black History Month celebration in New York.

The Douglass Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments. 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 Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition is part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. It seeks to promote the study of all aspects of slavery, in particular 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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Yale Books in Brief

Campus Notes