Yale Announces Additional 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize Finalist

At the request of the jury, the Board of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize has agreed to add a fourth book to the pool of finalists for the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize: Marlene L. Daut for Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023).

The jury's description of the book follows. Marlene Daut’s Awakening the Ashes is a magisterial intellectual history of the Haitian Revolution. With sweeping yet detailed research, Daut shows that the revolution was self-documented in a way that most slave revolts were not, and some of the best reconstructions of events came from the first generation of Haitian historians. By highlighting Haitian intellectuals’ research as well as their experiences, including those who have been long overlooked, Daut positions Haitians not only as witnesses of the revolution, but also as the first line of commentators on it. The result is a persuasive and critically important examination of Haitian anticolonial and antislavery ideas that would travel across Atlantic World in the revolution’s aftermath.

Jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University’s MacMillan Center, this annual prize of $25,000 recognizes the best book written in English on the topics of slavery, resistance, or abolition copyrighted in the preceding year. The winner will be announced following the Douglass Prize Review Committee meeting in the late fall, and the award will be presented at a celebration at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City on February 11, 2025.