A Major Award!!!!!

You know, as a kid, I never won a trophy. I am too old for "trophies for everyone." I think I got 5th place in the standing broad jump in 4th grade. which satisfied me just fine because the ribbon was pink and I was all about pink. Turns out band earned me a couple of medals in 8th grade, which I only just emerged from the haze of suppressed memories and old boxed items from my parents house, a surprising find since I made a concerted effort to be last chair. Otherwise, prizes have been few and far between in my life.

I tried not to put too much stock in awards because, well, I really would loved to have won a prize for something -- anything! -- but disappointment is a pill bitter enough to ruin the fun of doing things. Still, a prize for this book? With much shame, I admit that I desperately wanted a prize for this book. Any prize! I didn't care from whom or for what. I didn't care if it was the result of the adage that the winner is always the third choice of everyone on the prize committee -- the only one they all could agree upon. I didn't care if it was the book equivalent of "Miss Congeniality." I wanted the validation, dammit!

Thank you, New York Academy of History, you have given me that validation! Women in the World of Frederick Douglass received its Herbert Lehman Prize for Scholarship in New York History, sharing the prize with Mike Wallace's Greater Gotham: A History of New York City From 1898-1919 (for some context, Wallace won the Pulitzer Prize for his previous installment of his multi-volume history of New York City). I am honored and privileged and thrilled to have received such recognition!

Here is the coverage in Le Moyne's school newspaper, which itself was kind of cool.:

And here is me with the award. Thanks to the miracle that is texting, I could send this to my parents and my brothers' families and my nephew as it happened.:

It isn't a leg lamp, but it will do.

With all of these accolades, I do hope that I have done right by all of the people in the book. May sympathy and understanding of their lives have increased.