Stephanie McCurry Named Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner
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“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.