The New York Public Library have announced the five finalists for the inaugural Harriet Tubman Prize. The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture established this award to recognize nonfiction books that investigate the subject of slavery.
Here’s more 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 winner will be unveiled on December 12. The winning author will receive $7,500 in prize money. We’ve posted the full list below.
Finalists for the 2016 Harriet Tubman Prize
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 by Patrick Rael (The University of Georgia Press)
The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn (Yale University Press)