Freedom Seekers wins ACLS prize!
We’re excited to announce that Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London has received the inaugural 2024 ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award!
This is a new award the American Council of Learned Societies and Arcadia (the charitable foundation) have created for open access scholarship. We’re incredibly proud to have won this prestigious award up against other esteemed university presses.
Author Simon P. Newman and our Publisher, Emma Gallon, both attended the award ceremony in Baltimore.
Freedom Seekers was also the joint winner of the 2023 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
This prize-winning book reveals the hidden stories of enslaved and bound people who attempted to escape from captivity in England’s capital.
The judges wrote:
‘A deeply researched, well argued, and effectively presented look into a hidden world within seventeenth-century, that of slaves in the imperial capital. Freedom Seekers offers a new view into slavery’s deeply embedded history in Britain and the Atlantic world, and challenges the field to tackle important and challenging topics that still resonate in the modern world.’
2024 ACLS judge, History category
The book can be read for free online on our instance of Manifold, or downloaded as a PDF from the webpage. You can also purchase the book in print.
If you’d like to learn more about OA publishing, Simon took part in a Q&A with ACLS where he shares his experience as an Open Access author.