Another Major Award!

The Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, also known as SHEAR, awarded Women in the World of Frederick Douglass the Mary Kelley Book Prize in the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Prize! My sincere gratitude to the committee members, Nicholas Syrett, Stacey Robertson, and Kate Haulmann for their generosity in bestowing this award.

Here is Nick's citation:

I did not make a Jennifer Lawrence trip, as I did (off camera) at the Herbert Lehman Award ceremony. Perhaps the broken toe makes my gait more cautious. Toward the end you see me thank two people off camera. The first was April Haynes, who wrote a fantastic book, Riotous Flesh, about the solitary vice. The second was Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemings of Monticello, who so kindly blurbed Women in the World of Frederick Douglass and who is the new president of SHEAR. The outgoing president, the delightful Craig Friend, sits in the background in the video.

Also, when you win an award and the person for whom it is named is not only a person whose work you admire but is also in the audience, you get a picture with her and hope to be as distinguished as she is one day!:

Then, later, when one of the women's historians whose work you have admired since you first read The Plantation Mistress and who has supported your work from the beginning is there, you hunt her down and get a picture with her, too.:

I did not have the wit to get a picture with my former advisor, Richard Blackett; but the Women's Rights National Historical Park had both of our books in the bookstore. His book, Making Freedom, is on the higher shelf, of course!

Then, you find your friend and former co-editor, Diane Barnes, and she shows you her work, the second volume of Frederick Douglass's Correspondence.

Women in the World of Frederick Douglass was also down at Oxford UP's booth, too. (All copies sold by the end of the weekend! Plus one given away as a door prize to Daniel K. Richter's wife, and I read Richter's work for my master's degree back when I studied the colonial backcountry, so there you go!):

So, a fine weekend made more so that my friend and colleague Holly Rine could be there and will, with any luck, be accepting an award one day herself, and that so many people who had a hand in the book in some small way, if even just by writing a book that appeared in the endnotes, were there as well. Then, of course, my husband, Douglas Egerton, who was the important catalyst.