New Haven, Conn.— Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition today has announced the winners for the twenty-sixth annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African American experience.
The 2024 Prize will be shared by two scholars. The co-winners are Marlene L. Daut for “Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution” (University of North Carolina Press) and Sara E. Johnson for “Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World” (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press).
This annual prize, jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) at Yale University, recognizes the best book written in English on the topics of slavery, resistance, or abolition copyrighted in the preceding year. The $25,000 prize, shared by the two winners, will be presented to Daut and Johnson at an award ceremony sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute at Trinity Church in New York City on February 11, 2025.
From a total of 82 submissions, the finalists were selected by a jury of scholars that included Amy Murrell Taylor (Chair), T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky; Natasha J. Lightfoot, Associate Professor of History at Columbia University; and John K. Thornton, Professor of History and African American Studies at Boston University.
"These two extraordinary books,” Taylor notes, “are unique in focus but converge in the common quest to uncover the intellectual legacies of slavery and enslaved people, through wide-ranging and inventive readings of texts.” Both authors, she continues, “see in the French Caribbean, and the intellectual labors of Haitian people, the roots of modern thought about slavery and freedom, racism and colonialism."
In addition to Daut and Johnson, the other finalists for the 2024 prize were: Kerri K. Greenidge for “The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family” (Liveright Publishing Corporation); and Emily A. Owens for “Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans” (University of North Carolina Press).
Daut’s “Awakening the Ashes” recovers a voluminous body of scholarship produced by Haitian political figures, historians, and other writers. Reconstructing the internal documentation of the revolution, the book demonstrates the transcendent significance of this successful anticolonial and antislavery struggle for independence. Jury member John Thornton praised Daut’s ability to “place the revolutionaries’ ideas and actions in the context of a broad intellectual sphere.” Edward Rugemer, review committee member and Professor of History at Yale University, remarked that Daut has written “a marvelous account of a Haitian intellectual tradition that has been too long ignored by scholars in Europe and the United States.” The book, he added, offers “a brilliant retelling of the Haitian Revolution as Haitians have understood it for more than two hundred years.”