The five finalists for the Harriet Tubman Prize have been announced by the New York Public Library. This is the inaugural year for the prize which was established by the The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The award recognizes nonfiction books on the subject of slavery.
From the press release: “The finalists were selected by a Readers Committee of eleven scholars and librarians, which evaluated over thirty books submitted for consideration that were published in 2015…The members of the Selection Committee are Kathleen Bethel, African American Studies Librarian at Northwestern University; Greg Grandin, award-winning Professor of History at New York University, and Charles R. Johnson, award-winning novelist, essayist, and playwright and Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and English at Washington university.”
The winning author receives a cash prize of $7,500 and will be announced on December 12th.
Finalists for the 2016 Harriet Tubman Prize are:
From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Rio de la Plata by Alex Borucki (University of New Mexico Press)
Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844 by Aisha K. Finch (University of North Carolina Press)
Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret (Louisiana State University Press)
Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1875 byPatrick Rael (The University of Georgia Press)
The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn (Yale University Press)
