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Erica Armstrong Dunbar

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Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Author at the 2018 U.S. National Book Festival
NationalityAmerican
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Pennsylvania,
Columbia University
Academic work
DisciplineHistory
InstitutionsRutgers University

Erica Armstrong Dunbar is an American historian at Rutgers University. She is a distinguished Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers. An historian of African American women and the antebellum United States, Dunbar is the author of A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (2008) and Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (2017). Never Caught was a National Book Award for Nonfiction finalist and winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Life

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Dr.Dunbar attended college at the University of Pennsylvania, then earned an M.A. and Ph.D from Columbia University. She taught at the University of Delaware[1] before joining Rutgers University in 2017.[2] She is Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers. Her research and teaching focus on the history of African American women and late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century United States history.[2]

Her first book was A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City, published by Yale University Press in 2008.[3] In it she examines the lives black women made in Philadelphia’s large free black community, using documents like friendship albums and personal correspondence, church records, and labor contracts.[4]

In 2017 she published Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.[5][6][7][8][9] Never Caught was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for nonfiction.[10] In November 2018 Dunbar was named joint winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize for Never Caught.[11]

Works

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  • A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (Yale University Press, 2008) ISBN 9780300177022, OCLC 816818622
  • Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (Atria/37 Ink, February 2017) ISBN 9781501126413, OCLC 1019993773
  • The Politics of History: A New Generation of American Historians Writes Back with Jim Downs, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, and T.K. Hunter (in progress)

References

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  1. ^ Damsker, Mat (February 20, 2017). "A slave's flight from our first president". USA TODAY. Retrieved 5 October 2017.
  2. ^ a b Walcott-Shepherd, Candace. "Dunbar, Erica Armstrong". history.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2017-10-05.
  3. ^ Rael, Patrick (2008-12-01). "A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City". The American Historical Review. 113 (5): 1535–1536. doi:10.1086/ahr.113.5.1535. ISSN 0002-8762.
  4. ^ Reynolds, Rita (2011). "Review of A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City". Journal of the Early Republic. 31 (2): 322–324. doi:10.1353/jer.2011.0018. JSTOR 41261616. S2CID 144310779.
  5. ^ Melamed, Samantha (February 7, 2017). "Meet the slave who escaped from George Washington's Philly mansion and was never caught". Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved 5 October 2017.
  6. ^ Schuessler, Jennifer (6 February 2017). "In Search of the Slave Who Defied George Washington". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 October 2017.
  7. ^ Baker, Peter C. (January 19, 2017). "A Review of Erica Armstrong Dunbar's Never Caught". Pacific Standard. Retrieved 2017-10-05.
  8. ^ Lozada, Lucas Iberico (March 3, 2017). "Erica Armstrong Dunbar Talks Never Caught, the True Story of George Washington's Runaway Slave". Paste. Retrieved 2017-10-05.
  9. ^ "NEVER CAUGHT Ona Judge, the Washingtons, and the Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave by Erica Armstrong Dunbar". Kirkus Reviews. November 23, 2016. Retrieved October 5, 2017.
  10. ^ "2017 National Book Award finalists revealed". CBS News. October 4, 2017. Retrieved 2017-10-04.
  11. ^ "Rutgers, Harvard professors share 20th annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize". YaleNews. 2018-11-19. Retrieved 2018-11-20.
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