Vincent Brown has won the 2021 Harriet Tubman Prize for his book Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap/Harvard University Press). The $7,500 prize is sponsored by the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and honors "the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World."
The jury said the winning title presents "a shockingly novel view of an iconic slave rebellion, Tacky's Revolt, which he persuasively fashions as an African war against both Atlantic enslavement and the British Empire.
"Drawing on a colonial archive comprised of travel narratives, Royal African Company records, slave traders' ledgers, Board of Trade Records, Admiralty Court Records, diaries, correspondence, administrative sources, and contemporary histories, Brown composes a thick description of African political histories, trade and naval routes, European imperial conflicts, the plantation regime, sugar cultivation, inaccessible mountains, public roads, and secret footpaths that symbiotically comprise the Atlantic world.
"Simply put, Brown's spatial reconstruction of the landscape and seascape is brilliant. It affords the reader a level of political and social contextualization that truly advances Atlantic history and the study of the African diaspora. The reader discerns how military conflicts and experience in Africa are redeployed in the Americas, thereby positioning enslaved insurgents as enemy combatants and political actors. This shift in optics is engendered by Brown's nuanced delineation of the Atlantic and the plantation regime as a theater of war. Brown's interpretive work, sustained by detailed readings and excavation from the source material, is truly remarkable. The reader is privy to the re-assembling of an eighteenth-century world that seems stunningly vivid, palpable and real."
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The Jane Addams Peace Association has announced finalists for the 2022 Jane Addams Children's Book Award, which honors "children's books of literary and aesthetic excellence that effectively engage children in thinking about peace, social justice, global community, and equity for all people." Winners and honor books will be announced January 14. See the full list of finalists here.