I‘m a little late in posting this, but wanted to point your attention to the three finalists for this year’s Frederick Douglass Book Award that is sponsored by Yale’s Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.
The finalists are Thavolia Glymph for Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press); Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton and Company); and Jacqueline Jones, “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers). The prize comes with a generous check of $25,000. I’ve read both Annette Gordon-Reed’s book (a National Book Award winner) and Glymph’s study. Although the publisher sent me a copy of Saving Savannah, I have not had a chance to look through it. My money is on Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage.
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I would be shocked if Annette doesn’t win. She’s been on quite a roll this year.
Yeah, you are probably right. Gordon-Reed’s book is well written and the research is solid, but Glymph’s book is a much more important interpretive study.