2018 Harriet Tubman Prize Finalists Announced

Many an unfortunate and amazing thing has happened since my last blog post. Some are worthy of posts of their own, such as the fascinating Douglass conference in Paris this past weekend and the Douglass in Paris walking tour website created by one of the speakers, Rhae Lynn Barnes and her students. Today, however, this appeared in my "In Box" wholly unexpectedly:

2018 Harriet Tubman Prize Finalists 

The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery is pleased to announce the finalists of the annual Harriet Tubman Prize. In December, the prize of $7,500 will be awarded to the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World in 2017.

A Readers Committee of scholars and librarians selected the three finalists: Leigh Fought’s Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford UP); Tiya Miles’ The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (The New Press); and Tamara J. Walker’s Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima (Cambridge UP).

In Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, Leigh Fought illuminates the life of the famed abolitionist off the public stage. She begins with the women he knew during his life as a slave as well as Douglass’s varied relationships with white women who were crucial to the success of his newspapers, were active in the antislavery and women’s movements, and promoted his work nationally and internationally. By examining the circle of women around Frederick Douglass, this work brings these figures into sharper focus and reveals a fuller and more complex image of the self-proclaimed “woman’s rights man.”

Tiya Miles’ The Dawn of Detroit pieces together the experience of the unfree—both native and African American—in the frontier outpost of Detroit, a place wildly remote yet at the center of national and international conflict. Miles introduces new historical figures and unearths struggles that remained hidden from view until now. The result is fascinating history, little explored and eloquently told, of the limits of freedom in early America, one that adds new layers of complexity to the story of a place that exerts a strong fascination in the media and among public intellectuals, artists, and activists.

In Exquisite Slaves, Tamara J. Walker examines how slaves used elegant clothing as a language for expressing attitudes about gender and status in the wealthy urban center of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Lima, Peru. Drawing on traditional historical research methods, visual studies, feminist theory, and material culture scholarship, Walker argues that clothing was an emblem of not only the reach but also the limits of slaveholders’ power and racial domination. Even as it acknowledges the significant limits imposed on slaves’ access to elegant clothing, Exquisite Slaves also showcases the insistence and ingenuity with which slaves dressed to convey their own sense of humanity and dignity.

Congratulations to the finalists! The winner will be chosen by a Selection Committee and announced in December.

What an honor to be in the company of such incredible historians who do work of such complexity. I confess to being a particular fan of Miles's Haunted South, so I'm kind of rooting for her; but then Exquisite Slaves also sounds like a fascinating study. Women has no chance here, but so what? Look at the company it keeps and look at the committee that honored it this way. Thank you!

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.

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.