Amy Murrell Taylor has won the Frederick Douglass Prize from Yale University for her new book “Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps”
Here is the announcement from Yale University:
Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition announces the winner of the 21st annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize. The 2019 winner of the prize is Amy Murrell Taylor for “Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps” (University of North Carolina Press). Taylor holds the Theodore A. Hallam Professorship in History at the University of Kentucky.
One of the most coveted awards for the study of global slavery, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize is sponsored jointly by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. The $25,000 award for the best book published in English on slavery, resistance, or abolition will be presented to Taylor at a celebration in New York City on February 13, 2020. The celebration also will present a Special Achievement Award to Julius S. Scott’s “The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution” (Verso). Scott is Lecturer of Afroamerican and African Studies, Emeritus, at the University of Michigan.
In addition to Taylor, the other two finalists for the prize were Jessica A. Krug for “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom” (Duke University Press) and Brooke N. Newman for “A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica” (Yale University Press). The February ceremony will recognize all four books for their depth of research, originality, methodological sophistication, and literary merit.
A jury of scholars that included Manisha Sinha (Chair) of the University of Connecticut, Manuel Barcia of the University of Leeds, and Vincent Brown of Harvard University selected this year’s finalists from a field of 72 nominations. The winner was selected by a review board of representatives from the Gilder Lehrman Center, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Yale University.
Jury chair Manisha Sinha noted that Amy Murrell Taylor’s “Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps” is both beautifully written and “an extraordinary contribution to the history of emancipation and the American Civil War.” Original and nuanced, the book balances triumphant and pessimistic narratives of the wartime destruction of slavery, revealing the stories of individuals that inform the larger history of the thousands of African Americans who made their way to refugee camps. Sinha commented that the author’s analysis of the “politics of survival”—securing work, finding shelter, battling hunger, clothing bodies, and keeping faith—makes this book a masterwork of research and narration. “Taylor’s meditations on the difficult yet inspirational refugee experience of freedpeople,” said Sinha, “is an outstanding scholarly achievement that carries a timeless message for our own fraught times.”
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