Prof. Manning Finalist for 2008 Frederick Douglass Book Prize

New Haven, Conn.- Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, has announced the finalists for the Tenth Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the
most coveted awards for the study of the African-American experience.  Chandra Manning, Associate Professor in Georgetown's History Department, is one of the finalists for the award.

In recognizing Manning's work, the committee wrote: "In case we imagined that there was nothing more to say about that old question, "what had slavery to do with the American Civil War?" Chandra Manning shows that we were wrong. Her lively, readable book What this Cruel War was Over makes a striking argument that slavery was very much to do with the war, and that this was so throughout the conflict. Her subjects are the ordinary soldiers who fought; her sources include their letters and diaries, and their writings in regimental newspapers, many of which Manning discovered and uses for the first time. By tracing attitudes towards slavery among those who actually fought, What this Cruel War was Over provides a model study of "history from below", and ought finally to lay the ghost of the view that the Civil War was not about slavery."

The $25,000 annual award for the year's best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition is the most generous history prize in its field.  The prize winner will be announced following the Douglass Prize Review Committee meeting in September, and the award will be
presented at a dinner at the Yale Club of New York on February 19, 2009.

The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the one-time slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers, and orators of the nineteenth century.