Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He became the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century.
Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Ira Berlin was an American historian, professor of history at the University of Maryland, and former president of Organization of American Historians.
The Heroic Slave, a Heartwarming Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington, in Pursuit of Liberty is a short piece of fiction, or novella, written by abolitionist Frederick Douglass, at the time a fugitive slave based in Boston. When the Rochester Ladies' Anti Slavery Society asked Douglass for a short story to go in their collection, Autographs for Freedom, Douglass responded with The Heroic Slave. The novella, published in 1852 by John P. Jewett and Company, was Douglass's first and only published work of fiction.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family is a 2008 book by American historian Annette Gordon-Reed. It recounts the history of four generations of the African-American Hemings family, from their African and Virginia origins until the 1826 death of Thomas Jefferson, their master and the father of Sally Hemings' children.
The Ralph Waldo Emerson Award is a non-fiction literary award given by the Phi Beta Kappa society, the oldest academic society of the United States, for books that have made the most significant contributions to the humanities. Albert William Levi won the first of these awards, in 1960.
Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university's Faculty of Arts & Sciences. She is formerly the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Gordon-Reed is noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children.
Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice in the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the early modern Atlantic world.
The Frederick Douglass Book Prize is awarded annually by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
Rebecca Jarvis Scott is an American historian, and Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law, at University of Michigan.
Siddharth Kara is an Indian author. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a British Academy Global Professor, and an associate professor at the University of Nottingham. He is best known for his book "Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives" (2023). He has also published a trilogy on modern slavery: Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2009), Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia (2012), and Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective (2017).
The Cundill History Prize is an annual Canadian book prize for "the best history writing in English". It was established in 2008 by Peter Cundill and is administered by McGill University. The prize encourages "informed public debate through the wider dissemination of history writing to new audiences around the world" and is awarded to an author whose book, published in the past year, demonstrates "historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal". No restrictions are set on the topic of the book or the nationality of the author, and English translations are permitted.
John Stauffer is Professor of English, American Studies, and African American Studies at Harvard University. He writes and lectures on the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and photography.
Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian, and the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. and, most recently The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (20240.
Ada Ferrer is a Cuban-American historian. She is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American Studies at New York University, and will join the faculty at Princeton University as the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History in July of 2024. She was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book Cuba: An American History.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar is an American historian at Rutgers University. She is a distinguished Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers. An historian of African American women and the antebellum United States, Dunbar is the author of A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (2008) and Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (2017). Never Caught was a National Book Award for Nonfiction finalist and winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize.
Jeff Forret is an American historian and professor at Lamar University.
Marie Favereau Doumenjou is a French historian and writer. She currently teaches medieval history at Paris Nanterre University, and specialises in the history of the Mongol Empire and Islamic history. She has published several books. Her 2021 book, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, was published to critical acclaim, being nominated for the Cundill Prize, the Prose Award in World History by the Association of American Publishers, and listed as a notable book of the year by several publications.
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, A Black Family Keepsake is a 2021 non-fiction book by historian Tiya Miles that discusses American slavery in the 19th century; specifically focusing on Ashley's sack to guide the narrative.
