Washington Book Prize
The George Washington Book Prize recognizes the year’s best books on the nation’s founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history.
British born author Stephen Brumwell has won the 2013 George Washington Book Prize for his vivid exploration of GW’s early military years, George Washington: Gentleman Warrior.
MOUNT VERNON, VA—One of the nation’s largest literary awards, the annual George Washington Book Prize, has been awarded to Stephen Brumwell for George Washington: Gentleman Warrior (Quercus, 2012). An independent historian and award-winning author who lives in Amsterdam, Brumwell received the $50,000 prize on Tuesday evening, May 21, at a black-tie dinner at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
Most of us think of George Washington as the victorious commander-in-chief and wise statesman, but Brumwell breathes new life into a younger and edgier incarnation of our first president—the feisty frontier warrior who engaged the French and their Indian allies in brutal border skirmishes, the tough mid-career officer who turned the Continental Army into the weapon that defeated the British Empire. Even while Washington fought the redcoats, Brumwell argues, he relied on British models of military organization and gentlemanly behavior in shaping his distinctive style of leadership.
The Washington Prize, honoring the year’s best book about America’s founding era, is sponsored by a partnership of three institutions devoted to furthering historical scholarship: Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon. It particularly recognizes well-written books that speak to general audiences and contribute to a broad public understanding of the American past.
“Stephen Brumwell’s book is a pleasure to read from the very first pages, when he puts you right there, literally looking down the sights of a rifle held by a British officer who’s about to decide whether to kill George Washington,” said Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, which administers the prize. “He brings the frontier military experience to life—the vermin, the floggings, the constant fear of ambush and massacre. And readers get a vivid sense of Washington himself as a creation of eighteenth-century military culture.”
“George Washington: Gentleman Warrior is a wonderful read and the scholarship is deeply impressive—Stephen Brumwell was way down in the scholarly weeds sorting out things most eighteenth-century specialists don’t know much about,” added James G. Basker, president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which funds the award. “I don’t know if we’ll get a Washington book this good ever again.”
Born in Portsmouth on England’s South Coast, Brumwell worked for many years as a newspaper reporter before he went back to school to earn a Ph.D. in history. He is the author of Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe (Hambledon Continuum, 2006), which won the 2008 Society of Colonial Wars Distinguished Book Award and the 2008 Charles P. Stacey Prize; White Devil: An Epic Story of Revenge from the Savage War that Inspired The Last of the Mohicans (Weidenfield & Nicholson, 2004); and Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755-1763 (Cambridge, 2002). He also co-authored (with W.A. Speck) Cassell’s Companion to Eighteenth Century Britain (Cassell, 2001) and has participated as an historian in numerous television and radio programs.
The Washington Prize jury praised George Washington: Gentleman Warrior as “well-written and engaging,” and wrote: “In the hands of this fine biographer, Washington emerges as a flesh and blood man, more impressive than the mythical hero could ever be.”
The Mount Vernon event also celebrated three other finalists for this year’s prize: Eliga H. Gould’s Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard, 2012), Cynthia A. Kierner’s Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times (UNC, 2012) and Brian Steele’s Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood (Cambridge, 2012).
“As Mount Vernon prepares to open a new national library for George Washington this fall, never has it been more important for the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association to honor and highlight the contributions of these important authors covering early American history,” said Curtis Viebranz, president of George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
Finalists were selected by a three-person jury of distinguished American historians: Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History Emerita at Baruch College and a member of the history faculty at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, who served as Chair; Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography and professor of English at Dartmouth College; and Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and Senior Research Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. Brumwell’s book was named the ultimate winner by a panel of representatives from each of the three institutions that sponsor the prize, plus historian Barbara Oberg of Princeton University.
About the Prize
Created in 2005, the George Washington Book Prize was presented that year to Ron Chernow for Alexander Hamilton. Other winners are Stacy Schiff (2006) for A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, Charles Rappleye (2007) for Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution, Marcus Rediker (2008) for The Slave Ship: A Human History, Annette Gordon-Reed (2009) for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which also won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the National Book Award and the Frederick Douglass Prize, and Richard Beeman (2010) for Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution. In 2011, the Prize was awarded to Pauline Maier for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1789 and in 2012 the winner was Maya Jasanoff for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. The George Washington Book Prize recognizes the year’s best books on the nation’s founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history.
Contact Information
Lois Kitz , George Washington Book Prize Coordinator
E-mail: lkitz2@washcoll.edu
Telephone: (410) 810-7165
Fax: (410) 810-7175
Submissions should be sent to:
George Washington Book Prize
101 South Water Street
Chestertown MD 21620
In this section
Previous Winners
2012 Washington Book Prize at Mount Vernon
The Washington Prize, honoring the year’s best book about America’s founding era, is sponsored by a partnership of three institutions devoted to furthering historical scholarship: Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon. It particularly recognizes well-written books that speak to general audiences and contribute to a broad public understanding of the American past.
2012 Washington Book Prize at Mount Vernon
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The Washington Prize, honoring the year’s best book about America’s founding era, is sponsored by a partnership of three institutions devoted to furthering historical scholarship: Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon. It particularly recognizes well-written books that speak to general audiences and contribute to a broad public understanding of the American past.
Photo Galleries
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One of the nation’s largest literary awards, the annual George Washington Book Prize, was awarded to Maya Jasanoff for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World at Mount Vernon in May 2012. Complete with the Maryland Loyalist Battalion and WAC students recruiting for and against the loyalists, Jasanoff was welcomed to Washington College to discuss her book. The next morning Maya Jasanoff and Adam Goodheart had an open discussion about how books are born.
http://washingtoncollegenews.blogspot.com/2012/06/libertys-exiles-author-maya-jasanoff.html -
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One of the nation’s largest literary awards, the annual George Washington Book Prize was presented to Maya Jasanoff for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World.
The Washington Prize, honoring the year’s best book about America’s founding era, is sponsored by a partnership of three institutions devoted to furthering historical scholarship: Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon. It particularly recognizes well-written books that speak to general audiences and contribute to a broad public understanding of the American past. -
History, as we know, is most often told by the victors. In Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf, 2011), Harvard University history professor Maya Jasanoff, winner of the 2012 George Washington Book Prize, reverses the trend, tracing the stories of Americans loyal to the English crown and their forced exodus at the end of the American Revolution. “Losers seldom get to write thehistory, but the American loyalists have at last got their historian with Maya Jasanoff,” says historian Joseph J. Ellis, while Sean Wilentz says that her “stunning reinterpretation … affirms her place as one of the very finest historians of the rising generation.” Jasanoff is also author of the critically acclaimed Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850.
