Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 2, 2007|Volume 36, Number 9

Frederick Douglass Prize awarded
for book exploring British abolitionism

Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition has awarded the $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize to Christopher Leslie Brown, visiting professor of history at Columbia University, for “Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism.”

The prize is awarded annually for the best book on slavery or abolition by the Gilder Lehrman Center; it is sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York.

“Moral Capital” links the rise of the anti-slavery movement to a moral awakening the American Revolution engendered in Britain. It was published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press.

“‘Moral Capital’ not only provides an important new argument about British anti-slavery, but also highlights the nature of the relationship between moral sensibility and political activism at any time,” says Stephanie McCurry of the University of Pennsylvania, who with Laurent Dubois of Duke University and Leslie Harris of Emory University, selected this year’s finalists.

The other two finalists for the prize were Matt D. Childs for “The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery” (University of North Carolina Press); and Cassandra Pybus for “Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Freedom” (Beacon Press).

The Frederick Douglass award is the most generous history prize in the field. The prize will be presented to Brown at a dinner in New York City in February 2008.

The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field of slavery and abolition by honoring outstanding books. The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the most renowned American abolitionists, reformers, writers and orators of the 19th century.

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, part of The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, was launched in November 1998 through a generous donation by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Its mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery, especially the chattel slave system and its destruction.

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