News: $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize Finalists Announced

Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, has announced the finalists for the Twelfth Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African-American experience.

The finalists are: Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff for In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press); Siddharth Kara for Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (Columbia University Press); and Robert E. McGlone for John Brown's War Against Slavery (Cambridge University Press). The $25,000 annual award for the year's best non-fiction book on slavery,resistance, and/or abolition is the most generous history prize in its field. The winner will be announced following the Douglass Prize Review Committee meeting in, and the award will be presented at a dinner at the Yale Club of New York on February 24, 2011.

The Frederick Douglass Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments. Previous winners are Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan in 1999; David Eltis, 2000; David Blight, 2001; Robert Harms and John Stauffer, 2002; James F. Brooks and Seymour Drescher, 2003; Jean Fagan Yellin, 2004; Laurent Dubois, 2005; Rebecca J. Scott, 2006; Christopher Leslie Brown, 2007; Stephanie Smallwood, 2008; and Annette Gordon-Reed, 2009.

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, writers, and orators of the nineteenth century. Eighty books were nominated this year.

In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World, by Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff (University of California Press), tells the fascinating story of how enslaved Africans shaped and changed the landscape of the New World. With remarkable originality, the authors reveal how the men and women of the Middle Passage wielded their agricultural experience as part of the unending struggle to control their own lives. Interpreting archival evidence with both rigor and creativity, Carney and Rosomoff explore the provisioning of slave ships, the transfer and diffusion of African horticultural knowledge, the botanical gardens of slaves, and the gastronomic legacies of black slavery, among many other intriguing topics. Comprehensive and compelling, this is a work of truly global dimensions that narrates the ordeal of enslavement as a simultaneous story of food, memory, and survival.

Siddharth Kara's book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (Columbia University Press) carefully and compassionately convinces us to understand the phenomenon of modern-day human sex trafficking as part of the history of slavery and abolition. As an investigative reporter, Kara posed as a customer across Asia, Europe, and the United States, entangling himself with perpetrators and speaking confidentially with victims. Sidestepping sensationalism and absent any delusion of casting himself as a rescuer, Kara relates wrenching stories in lucid prose, thereby shedding a strong and steady beam of light on a widespread and ongoing global crime. With an exemplary mixture of courage and humility, the author combines a gripping first-person narrative with trenchant economic analysis and clear-eyed proposals for change. In the end, this book prevents us from consigning slavery to the past.

John Brown's War Against Slavery, by Robert E. McGlone (Cambridge University Press), tells a new version of the story of John Brown by taking on the most perplexing question of all: Why did John Brown carry out the raid at Harper's Ferry? With a fine balance of narration and interpretation, McGlone offers a meticulous re-creation of Brown's life, returning to old questions and asking new ones. No quest for seamless analysis, McGlone's story embraces complexity as he charts transformations in Brown's family alongside the shifting political world of the antebellum United States. This absorbing and learned book ultimately portrays a keen, compassionate, and conflicted abolitionist who made a purposeful decision to go forward with a plot that was sure to fail, but only in the most literal sense.

Text Source: Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University

Image Source: First Edition of Douglass' autobiography; In The Shadow of Slavery ; Sex Trafficking; John Brown's War Against Slavery

News---Frederick Douglass Book Award of $25,000: The Nominees Are . . .

Finalists Announced for the 2009 Frederick Douglass Book Prize

Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, has announced the finalists for the Eleventh Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African-American experience.

The finalists are: Thavolia Glymph for Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press); Annette Gordon-Reed for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton and Company); and Jacqueline Jones for Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers).

The $25,000 annual award for the year's best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition is the most generous history prize in its field. The prize winner will be announced following the Douglass Prize Review Committee meeting in September, and the award will be presented at a dinner at the Yale Club of New York on February 25, 2010. This year's finalists were selected from a field of over fifty entries by a jury of scholars that included Robert Bonner (Dartmouth College), Rita Roberts (Scripps College), and Pier Larson (Johns Hopkins University).

Thavolia Glymph's Out of the House of Bondage draws attention in a wholly new way to the strife between Southern plantation mistresses and those enslaved black women they sought to master. The book's bold and wide-ranging research, its lucid emphasis on the "public" nature of slaveholding households, and its passionate argumentation results in a deep and disturbing account of white cruelty and black resentment. In addition to re-connecting plantation mistresses to the systematic violence of slavery, Glymph persuasively documents how the social, political, and economic upheavals of emancipation spurred new opportunities and fostered recurrent conflicts. This incisive study promises to inspire new research agendas among Southern historians for years to come.

In Annette Gordon Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello, an enslaved Virginia family is delivered -- but not disassociated -- from Thomas Jefferson's well-known sexual liaison with Sally Hemings. The book judiciously blends the best of recent slavery scholarship with shrewd commentary on the legal structure of Chesapeake society before and after the American Revolution. Its meticulous account of the mid-eighteenth century intertwining of the black Hemingses and white Wayles families sheds new light on Jefferson's subsequent conjoining with a young female slave who was already his kin by marriage. By exploring those dynamic commitments and evasions that shaped Monticello routines, the path-breaking book provides a testament to the complexity of human relationships within slave societies and to the haphazard possibilities for both intimacy and betrayal.

Jacqueline Jones' Saving Savannah memorably charts a bustling city's passage from slavery to freedom. Covering a twenty-year span, the book tracks the fortunes of an unforgettable cast of characters, setting fugitive slaves beside imperfectly paternalist masters and proud black fire fighters beside idealistic Northern-born missionaries. Interwoven with the book's tapestry of stories is a series of crisp assessments of Savannah's social, political, religious, and economic institutions, many of which were pioneered by a vibrant free black community in the antebellum period. The account provides both a gripping read and a new interpretation of how those whites "laid low"by Confederate defeat regained a semblance of control over this majority-black city.

The Institute maintains two websites, www.gilderlehrman.org and the quarterly online journal History Now.

On July 23

On this day in ...
... 1920, May Wright Sewall died in Indianapolis, Indiana, 76 years after her birth in Wisconsin, and just a month before women's suffrage -- an issue to which she'd devoted her lifework -- would come into effect in the United States via ratification of the 19th Amendment. She had earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Northwestern Female College in Evanston, Illinois, now part of Northwestern University. She taught throughout the Midwest, founding a girls' school in Indianapolis. Elected president of the National Congress of Women in 1891 and of the International Congress of Women (ICW) in 1899, Sewall, like many feminists of the day, combined her work for women's rights with work for peace. Thus she chaired the ICW standing committee on peace and arbitration and a 1915 Organized Conference of Women Workers to Promote Peace, and sailed in 1915 on Henry Ford's Peace Expedition. As we've posted, Sewall, along with IntLawGrrls transnational foremother Susan B. Anthony and others, led a women's rights meeting at which abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave the last speech of his life. (credit for portrait of Sewall on display in Indiana's capital)
... 1962, in Geneva, Switzerland, Laos and more than a dozen other countries signed the International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos, the result of a 2-month conference. They "pledged to respect Laotian neutrality" and "to refrain from interference 'direct or indirect' in the internal affairs" of that country. The agreement would be breached in the course of the Vietnam War.

(Prior July 23 posts are here and here.)

On February 20

On this day in ...
... 1895, an hour after he left the meeting of a women's rights group led by May Wright Sewall, Susan B. Anthony, and Anna Howard Shaw, 77-year-old abolitionist and suffragist Frederick Douglass collapsed and died at his home in Washington, D.C. The New York Times obituary said of the man depicted below left in a Rochester, New York, statue of him and Anthony at tea:

It is a singular fact, in connection with the death of Mr. Douglass, that the very last hours of his life were given in attention to one of the principles to which he has devoted his energies since his escape from slavery. This morning he drove into Washington from his residence, about a mile out from Anacostia, a suburb just across the eastern branch of the Potomac, and at 10 o'clock appeared at Metzerott Hall, where the Women's National Council is holding its triennial. Mr. Douglass was a regularly-enrolled member of the National Women's Suffrage Association, and had always attended its conventions.

... 2005, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega (right), Spain's Vice President, announced that 76% of the electorate had voted for the Constitutional Treaty of the European Union in the 1st referendum on the charter. The treaty faltered in other countries, however, and its successor, the Lisbon Treaty, likewise remains unratified, as IntLawGrrls posted.

(Prior February 20 posts are here and here.)

Guest Blogger: L. Song Richardson

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome L. Song Richardson (right) as today's guest blogger.

A specialist in criminal law, criminal procedure, and prosecutorial ethics, Song is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University College of Law, and this semester she's a visiting professor at Boston College Law School. Song earned her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was on the board of the Yale Journal of International Law, and her B.A. in psychology from Harvard College. While at Harvard she earned distinction for her classical piano performances, which included performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Before entering academia, Song was a Skadden Arps Public Interest Fellow with the National Immigration Law Center, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. As a state and federal public defender and private practitioner of criminal defense, she represented defendants in numerous white collar, serious felony, and capital cases. That expertise is evident in Song's guest post below, which exposes a defect in foreign evidence-gathering mechanisms and proposes a solution to the problem.

Song dedicates her post to Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (1924-2005) who, as Song writes,

in 1968, became the first African American woman elected to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. She became an international figure as a vocal critic of the war in Vietnam and, throughout her career, tirelessly championed numerous issues including civil rights, women’s rights and the rights of the urban poor.

In addition, as prior IntLawGrrls posts have noted, Chisholm ran for the highest office in the United States. In her most concerted campaign she entered several Presidential primaries (below left), and received 151.95 delegate votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. In 1984 Chisholm was trounced in a bid for the Democratic nomination for Vice President by another woman, Geraldine A. Ferraro. Chisholm was not the 1st African American person nominated for President at a major-party convention. As we've posted, that milestone was reached in 1888 by Frederick Douglass, who'd also run for Vice President in 1872 on a minor-party ticket headed by a woman, Presidential candidate Victoria Claflin Woodhull. Nor was Chisholm the 1st woman nominated for President at a major-party convention; as we've also posted, 8 years earlier Margaret Chase Smith had made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican Presidential nod. Nonetheless, the placement in IntLawGrrls' foremothers list at right of this 1st African American woman to have her name placed in nomination is especially apt on this day of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

Heartfelt welcome!

Forthcoming---Author Describes Writing Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, John Stauffer, Twelve Publishing, 448 pages,$30.00 (November 3, 2008)

Behind The Book: How Giants Came into Being by John Stauffer

"It’s often said that biographies reveal as much about their biographers as their subject. I plead guilty, for I was born in Lincoln (Nebraska) and fell in love with the Civil War era at age fourteen, which is when I began reading Lincoln and Douglass.

Moving was the central experience of my formative years, and literature and history offered alternative realities that could redeem the constant dislocations and confusions of my adolescence in the late 1970s. I hungered for characters I could identify with; and those from the Civil War era seemed larger than life, more heroic, able to give meaning and purpose to my present.

I was especially drawn to Douglass. I loved the way he wrote, I yearned to have something of his undaunted courage, and, strange as it may seem now, I wanted to be like him. After all, here was a slave—a total outsider—who stood up to the meanness around him at the risk of losing his life, and who found in books a way to “give tongue to his thoughts,” as he put it. A few years later, I realized that Lincoln too, had been an outsider, escaping the fighting and drinking of his backwoods communities through literature. They learned how to use words as weapons, and I desperately wanted a dependable weapon.

Years later, while in graduate school, I realized just how significant Douglass’s and Lincoln’s rise really was; they are the two preeminent self-made men in American history. (Other contenders like Ben Franklin began life with more comfort and status.) At the time, I was researching abolitionists, and had fallen in love with the wide array of wonderfully weird men and women, from blacks and whites to rich and poor, their wild utopian visions, and their extraordinary journeys through life. I wanted to know how they were able to remake themselves, what the costs of doing so were, and how self-transformation related to race and reform.

I addressed these themes in my first book, The Black Hearts of Men, and while writing it, discovered that Douglass and Lincoln ultimately became friends, despite the social and political gulfs separating them. I wanted to know how and why Douglass and Lincoln were able to come together as they did; and I decided to write about their self-making. Their friendship, I realized, depended in part on their having continually remade themselves.

In the past fifty years, scholars have largely disparaged the concept of self-making. They saw it as a term for Madison Avenue, not the Ivory Tower; it had the ring of an advertisement, not scholarship. Yet the concept of self-making, its rewards and costs, is central to the American experience, for it functions as a barometer of the ideals of freedom and equality of opportunity. I also felt that scholars had not adequately accounted for the significance of self-making in the personalities, politics, and decisions of Douglass and Lincoln. Too often, these men are written about as though they were born brilliant, a cut above other mortals. Too often, Lincoln has been characterized as America’s Christ, the redeemer president. The result is a static, romantic, mythic figure rather than a man born dirt poor living, striving, grappling in a distant past.

Giants began in 2005 as an essay on Douglass and Lincoln in the July 4th issue of Time Magazine. Initially, I planned to include the essay as part of a book on interracial friendship, but their story, I realized, was bigger than an essay or chapter. Giants was written at a propitious time. Not only is Lincoln’s bicentennial in 2009, which kept me on or near deadline; but Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope had become a bestseller and then of course Obama decided to run for president. Obama’s journey, like Douglass’s and Lincoln’s, has been nothing short of breathtaking. Perhaps it is not coincidental that he knows Douglass and Lincoln better than many scholars, has steeped himself in their writings, and has been inspired by them. While many journalists have noted the influence of Lincoln on Obama, none has shown how Douglass shaped his understanding of himself and his country.

Writing the book has thus given me a much better understanding of our own time. We carry the past within us and are unconsciously shaped by it, to paraphrase James Baldwin. In certain respects, the Civil War is not over; we are still fighting about the meanings of America on cultural and political fronts. Indeed, while steeped in the writings of Lincoln and Douglass, and sometimes dreaming of them, I found myself quoting Faulkner’s famous maxim, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” ―John Stauffer

CWL---John Stauffer's Meteor of War on John Brown and his Black Hearts Of Abolitionists on Brown's and other abolitionists' identification with slaves are both remarkable books in their freshness of perspective that rings true; the works set the militant and pacifist abolitionists within the climate of their times.

Stauffer's books as well as David Reynolds' John Brown, Abolitionist depict John Brown, as someone who has has rationally placed his being into the hands of a perfectly loving, perfectly just God who hates the type of slavery that fractures families and human dignity. Brown, who is often seen as a madman or an incompetent, is revealed as more fully human and humane than most social critics of the era. Yet, his violence had an unforntuate place in the 19th century world, similar to the caning of Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the floor of the U.S. Senate and the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas by border ruffians.

On September 3

On this day in ...
... 1838 (170 years ago today), a man who'd become an internationally renowned advocate of slavery abolition and universal suffrage, for women as well as men, Frederick Douglass, escaped from slavery. Douglass, who was about 21 at the time, left Maryland and traveled by train to New York. He wore the clothes and carried the ID papers of a freed sailor of African ancestry. (credit for photo montage of Douglass and colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
... 301, Marinus, a stonemason-turned-Saint believed to have been born in what is now Croatia, founded San Marino, among the world's oldest republics. Today the mountainous country (flag at right), which is about the size of Washington, D.C., and is fully surrounded by Italy, has a population of about 31,000.

Presidential Puzzler Answered

Answers to today's Presidential Puzzler above:

1) Frederick Douglass (left). As we've posted, he was nominated for the Presidency at the Republican National Convention in 1888. Benjamin Harrison emerged from that convention as the nominee, and was elected later that year.

2) Margaret Chase Smith (right). As we've posted, she was nominated for the Presidency at the Republican National Convention in 1964. The man who emerged from that convention as the nominee, Barry Goldwater, would lose to Lyndon Baines Johnson in November.

3) Yes. In 1872, the Equal Rights Party nominated Victoria Claflin Woodhull for President and Frederick Douglass for Vice President. Woodhull (left) and her running mate had no chance; the general election was easily won by Civil War hero and incumbent GOP President Ulysses S. Grant.

On June 23, ...

... 1888, at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Frederick Douglass (right), the abolitionist and women's suffragist who had escaped slavery in 1838 and written and spoken out about his experiences ever since, became the 1st American of African ancestry proposed for nomination as President of the United States. Benjamin Harrison would win the GOP nomination 2 days later; soon after his election, Harrison named Douglass U.S. minister to Haiti. (For an excellent analysis of Douglass' transformative midcentury journey to famine-struck Ireland, see Peter D. O'Neill, “Frederick Douglass and the Irish,” 5 Foilsiú 57 (2006) (available here).
... 1894, the International Olympic Committee, an international, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, was founded as a means to revive the famed athletic games of ancient Greece.