About the Prize
WASHINGTON COLLEGE ANNOUNCES 2008 BOOK PRIZE FINALISTS
Chestertown, Feb. 22, 2008 –
In commemoration of George Washington’s birthday, Washington College today announced three finalists for the 2008 George Washington Book Prize.
The $50,000 award—co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon—is the largest prize nationwide for a book on early American history, and one of the largest literary prizes of any kind. It recognizes the year’s best books on the nation’s founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history.
The newly announced finalists are Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang), Jon Latimer’s 1812: War with America (Belknap/Harvard), and Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship:
A Human History (Viking).
The books are a provocative group: a history of the making
of the Constitution in which the Framers seem to be working, not for, but against, ordinary Americans; the War of 1812 as seen from the other side of the Atlantic; and a harrowing re-creation of the slave ships – the floating dungeons that carried millions of men, women, and children to these shores from Africa.
“For more than 200 years, Americans have been engaged in an ongoing—and sometimes contentious—conversation about the meaning and significance of our founding era,” said historian Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, which administers the prize. “The Washington Prize recognizes books that contribute fresh ideas to that national conversation, and approach American history in new ways.”
The winner will be announced at a gala celebration May 29 at George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens in Virginia.
Previous winners were Charles Rappleye in 2007 for Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution; Stacy Schiff in 2006 for A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America; and Ron Chernow in 2005 for Alexander Hamilton.
The finalists were selected by a jury of three distinguished historians: Robert L. Middlekauff of the University of California at Berkeley, chair; Elizabeth A. Fenn of Duke University; and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, director of Monticello’s International Center for Jefferson Studies and professor of history at the University of Virginia.
They reviewed 78 books published last year on the founding period in American history, from about 1760 to 1820—time of the creation and consolidation of the young republic.
The jurors described Woody Holton’s book as “a new, important and challenging interpretation of the Constitution.” His “unruly Americans” are the ordinary citizens who challenged the Framers and forced them to accept the changes that produced the document we revere. “Woody Holton has written a book of revision,” they wrote, “one part a brief against much conventional scholarship on the Constitution’s origins, and one part a reconstruction of the role the people, in particular small farmers, played in its drafting…. It will not convince everyone, but it will be recognized as a book that reopens an old argument and makes its own with attention to the empirical sources and with stimulating insights. It should receive a wide reading.”
Dr. Holton is associate professor of history at the University of Richmond and author of the award-winning Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia.
Jon Latimer’s sixth book is the first military history of the War of 1812 from the British perspective published since the early 19th century. The jury called it “sparkling” and wrote that he “has not only mastered a large body of scholarship, he has made sensitive use of the diaries, letters, and records of people otherwise unknown to written history. Thus it is fair to say that Latimer has given us not only a book impressive for its grand sweep, but also one that recovers the experience of ordinary people engaged in the testing conflict that sometimes brought death, suffering, and triumph. Indeed Latimer’s book is altogether satisfying in its perspective, its insights, and its compelling prose.”
An Associate Fellow of the Callaghan Centre for the Study of Conflict at Swansea University in Wales, Latimer has a degree from the University in oceanography and served in the Territorial Army for 16 years.
Marcus Rediker’s Slave Ship covers “virtually every aspect of the story of where the slaves were from, how they were captured and imprisoned, transported to slave ships, and their treatment on board,” the jurors wrote. “Rediker describes his book as ‘painful’; it was surely painful to write. Despite the emotional cost to its author, it is beautifully written. Indeed, the book is, in its use of evidence and determination to expose the bleakness of the slave experience, evocative and moving, and deeply instructive in unsuspected ways.”
Rediker is a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and the prize-winning author of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
Book Prize News
Charles Rappleye Comes to Washington College for Book Prize Celebration$50,000 Book Prize Awarded to Charles Rappleye for Sons of Providence
Washington College Announces 2007 Book Prize Finalists
Richard
Gilder and Lewis Lehrman Awarded National Humanities Medal
Contact Information
For additional information about the George Washington Book Prize, please contact:
Joan Smith, George Washington Book Prize Coordinator
E-mail: jsmith7@washcoll.edu
Telephone: (410) 810-7165
Fax: (410) 810-7110
Submissions should be sent to:
George Washington Book Prize Coordinator
C.V. Starr Center
The Custom House
101 South Water Street
Chestertown MD 21620
