Stephanie McCurry Named Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner

Professor of History Stephanie McCurry has been selected as the winner of the 2011 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for her book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. The Douglass prize is awarded annually by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and is accompanied by a $25,000 prize to be presented to the recipient in February. The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field of slavery and abolition.

“McCurry’s Confederate Reckoning traces the rise and fall of ‘a modern proslavery and antidemocratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal,’” noted Seth Rockman, the 2011 Douglass Prize jury chair and associate professor of history at Brown University. Rockman continues, “McCurry deepens our understanding of the slaves’ self-emancipation, while also clarifying the radical nature of the Confederate project.”

McCurry is a specialist in 19th-century American history with a focus on the American South, the Civil War era and the history of women and gender. She served as director of both the California History Project and the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University and has co-chaired the program committee of the Organization of American Historians since 2003. She has held numerous fellowships from institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, the American Association of University Women, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Guggenheim Foundation.

McCurry is the author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, which received awards including the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Charles Snyder Award of the Southern Historical Association. She received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton.