Washington College has named four finalists for the 2015 George Washington Book Prize. One of the nation’s largest and most prestigious literary awards, the George Washington Book Prize recognizes the best new books on early American history. The $50,000 award is sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and Washington College. Now in its eleventh year, the award recognizes works that not only shed new light on the nation’s founding era, but also have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history.
This year’s four honorees spark new thinking on the American Revolution: its causes and principles, the meaning of liberty and freedom in the young democracy, and the impact of the Revolution that reverberated throughout the 18th-century Atlantic world. Nick Bunker’s An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (Knopf) probes Great Britain’s internal tensions on the eve of revolution. In The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding(Harvard) Eric Nelson turns upside down the conventional image of the war as a rebellion against a tyrannical king. Richard Dunn’s new book, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Harvard), tackles one of the American Revolution’s most challenging issues: human bondage in an age of liberty. And rounding out the slate of finalists, François Furstenberg’s collective biography, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (Penguin Press), explores how former French revolutionaries, émigrés to Philadelphia, influenced the growth of the new American republic.
An independent scholar in Lincolnshire, England, Bunker was formerly a journalist for the Financial Times and an investment banker, and is the author of Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History (2010). Dunn is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his many publications is Sugar and Slaves (1972), an acclaimed analysis of the Caribbean plantation slave society. Furstenberg is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins. His first book, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation, was a finalist for the 2007 George Washington Book Prize. Nelson is Robert M. Beren Professor of Government at Harvard and the author of The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (2010) and The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (2004).
Distinguished historians Rosemarie Zagarri, Philip Morgan and Ted Widmer served as the jury that selected the four finalists from a field of nearly 70 books published in the past year. The winner of the $50,000 prize will be announced at a black-tie gala on May 20 at Mount Vernon.
More information about the George Washington Book Prize is available at washcoll.edu/gwbookprize. For more information about the four finalists or to arrange interviews, please contact George Washington Book Prize Coordinator Jean Wortman at [email protected], 410-810-7165.
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