U.Va. Historian Alan Taylor Wins 2014 Pulitzer for Book on Slaves and War
April 14, 2014

University of Virginia historian Alan Taylor, one of the nation's premier
experts in Colonial America and the early U.S. republic, has received a
Pulitzer Prize for his book, "The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in
Virginia, 1772-1832."

The Pulitzer committee's citation calls the book "a meticulous and
insightful account of why runaway slaves in the colonial era were drawn to
the British side as potential liberators."

Taylor, who arrived at U.Va. in March and will begin teaching in August as
the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Chair in the Corcoran Department
of History in the College of Arts & Sciences, said he was "astonished" at
the news.

"I realized it when my email went crazy," Taylor said. "It is nice when you
get congratulations from so many friends. It is wonderful to see how happy
others are at my good fortune."

This is not the first time Taylor has won the prize. He received his first
Pulitzer in 1996 for his book, "William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion
on the Frontier of the Early Republic." He also received a Bancroft Prize
for that book.

"I didn't expect my first Pulitzer and I certainly did not expect this,"
said Taylor, who received the news in Philadelphia, where he was preparing
a talk for a group of historians.

Halliday noted that Taylor's book was still in contention for the
Washington Book Prize - as is Andrew O'Shaughnessy's book, "The Men Who
Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of
the Empire" - and had been short-listed for the National Book Award, along
with many other accolades.

"This is only one of the many prominent recognitions it will receive,"
Halliday said. "This is an important but little-known story, but one that
is very important to us in Virginia."

"The Internal Enemy" tells the story of about 3,000 enslaved Africans from
the Chesapeake region who escaped slavery by fleeing to the British and
helping them to wage war on the United States during the War of 1812, said
Taylor, who taught at the University of California, Davis for about 20
years before joining U.Va.'s faculty. "The book sets that story in the
context of the shifting nature of slavery after the American Revolution,"
he said.

The Pulitzer announcement says, "Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's
riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians,
haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course."

"It was an extraordinary set of human dramas, the resourcefulness of people
who were seeking freedom, stealing boats in the middle of the night to go
out and find British warships and offer their services," Taylor said.

Taylor said he was drawn to the story in part because so little seemed
known about it. He stumbled upon it while he was researching something else
and was surprised that he had never heard these stories.

"This was supposed to be my area," he said. "Most people never heard about
it. A lot knew about the earlier slave escapes during the American
Revolution, but these events were much better documented."

Taylor thinks in part these episodes were overlooked by historians because
they took place during the War of 1812, a forgotten and ignored war. This
is Taylor's second book about the War of 1812 and he hopes that the
notoriety of the Pulitzer will bring his book to the attention of more
readers than would ordinarily read a history book.

"Alan Taylor has always been interested in public history and writing for
the layman, not just the scholar," O'Shaughnessy said. "He has succeeded in
making an important methodological breakthrough in the discipline with his
ability to integrate modern social history - the lives of ordinary people -
into the grand narrative of political, military and economic history."

Taylor is highly regarded as a historian who has reshaped how fellow
historians and the general public look at the topic. Halliday described him
as a pioneer in "microhistory," which examines particular episodes, places
or small groups of people so that broader meanings become apparent.
Halliday said Taylor has also broken ground in conceiving early American
history as part of a global story, especially around the Atlantic Ocean.

"It is a story about forces and actors at work all around the Atlantic,"
Halliday said, "such as the competition of multiple European empires in,
for and around North America; the commerce in human lives brought forcibly
from the west of Africa; contacts among multiple cultures as they traded,
conducted political negotiations, intermarried and so on. Truly great
writing about the American past, like Alan's, reveals just how deeply
embedded we are and always have been in the world around us."

Aside from this current work, Taylor is also the author of  "Liberty Men
and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier,"
"The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers and the Northern Borderland of the
American Revolution," "American Colonies: The Settling of North America"
and "The Civil War of 1812."

Taylor is the fourth Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor in
History since 1958 when the endowed chair was created. The first holder of
the chair was Pulitzer Prize winner Dumas Malone, best known for "Jefferson
and His Time," his six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson. He was
followed by notable Jefferson scholars Merrill Daniel Peterson and, most
recently, Peter S. Onuf, who retired in 2012.

From a UVA website

Jon Kukla
________________
www.JonKukla.com <http://www.jonkukla.com/>

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