Happy to announce that the Princeton Alumni Weekly is running an excerpt from Happy Dreams of Liberty​ in their Featured Authors section (the dream of any Princeton grad). You can check it out here.

If you have a long road trip or plane ride coming up this holiday season, do I have good news for you: Happy Dreams of Liberty will be released as an audiobook on December 26, narrated by Allyson Johnson. You can find it on Audible.com, Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, and other online retailers.

Allyson Johnson has narrated titles by groundbreaking historians such as Annette Gordon-Reed, Nell Irvin Painter, and Tiya Miles (along with many other distinguished authors -- including Neil deGrasse Tyson), so it's an honor and a pleasure to hear her read Happy Dreams of Liberty.

So that's 9 hours and 20 minutes of my travel time covered...

The Frederick Douglass Prize is awarded by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center and recognizes the best book written on slavery, resistance, or abolition in the last year. From the press release:

Simon Newman's book is Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London, and is available from the University of Chicago Press. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South, by Dr. David Silkenat of the University of Edinburgh, was also shortlisted for this year's prize, and is available from Oxford University Press.

I got a big surprise this summer when I learned that the Society of Civil War Historians had named Happy Dreams of Liberty the winner of their 2023 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Part of the surprise came from the fact that this is an award for "the best book published on the causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War," and I hadn't really thought of my book as a Civil War story.

Happy Dreams of Liberty focuses on the lives of the Townsend family under slavery, through their emancipation in 1860 (shortly before the Civil War), and in their struggle for freedom and equality across the country in the decades after. One of the Townsends, Charles Osborne, did enlist in the Union Army during the war, but he served as a clerk and quartermaster in Union-occupied Vicksburg for just a year. His experience of wartime wasn't blood and battles; it was paperwork and patrol duty. The other Townsends spent the war farming, teaching, marrying, and raising families. The war itself takes up only a few pages in the entire book. 

Last February, I was honored to receive the The Huntington Library's 2023 Shapiro Book Prize for the best first book in American history and culture. Often, the "big" histories (sweeping national narratives and presidential biographies) are the books that get the most attention. For the prize jury to recognize the significance of the enslaved family's story at the heart of Happy Dreams of Liberty is an immense honor and a validation of all the "small" stories out there that expand our understanding of what -- and who -- count as important pieces of American history.

You can check out the public lecture I gave at the Huntington in February on YouTube.