Yale University Press Awarded R. R. Hawkins Award

Press Release

More than 45 PROSE Awards, including the top prize, the R.R. Hawkins Award, were presented February 3, 2011 at a special Awards Luncheon during the PSP Annual Conference at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. Award winners included Elsevier, American Psychological Association, Oxford University Press, John Wiley & Sons, University of Texas Press, Getty Publications and American Chemical Society. A full list of winners can be found at the end of this press release.

The 2010 R.R. Hawkins Award was presented to Yale University Press for Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by David Eltis and David Richardson. A groundbreaking work, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, provides the fullest possible picture of the extent and inhumanity of one of the largest forced migrations in history. The book also won the PROSE Award for Excellence in Reference Works and the Single Volume Reference/Humanities & Social Sciences category.

“This year’s recipient of the R. R. Hawkins Award is a truly exceptional work,” explains PROSE Awards Chairman John A. Jenkins, President and Publisher of CQ Press. “Selected from an unprecedented number of highly qualified submissions, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is an inspiring example of the extraordinary level of excellence honored by the Hawkins prize.” The prestigious R.R. Hawkins Award recognizes scholarly works in all disciplines of the humanities and sciences, and is given for the most outstanding professional, reference or scholarly work among the year’s award winners. The Award was presented at today’s Awards Luncheon by Tom Allen, President and CEO of the AAP.

This year’s winners were determined by a distinguished panel of 16 PROSE judges: Joseph S. Alpert, University of Arizona; Steve Chapman, McGraw-Hill; Barbara Chen, Modern Language Association; F. Michael Connelly, University of Toronto; Jeff Dean, Wiley-Blackwell; Michael Fisher, Harvard University Press; Nigel Fletcher-Jones, Lexicon Publishing Consultants; James M. Jasper, City University of New York; Myer Kutz, Myer Kutz Associates; Jean Laponce, Columbia University; George Lobell, Wiley-Blackwell; Helle Mathiasen, University of Arizona; Carol McGall, John Wiley & Sons; John Ryden, Yale University Press; Henry Tom, The Johns Hopkins University Press; and Toni Tracy, Portico. The 2010 PROSE Awards received a record-breaking 491 entries – more than ever before in its 35-year history – from more than 60 professional and scholarly publishers across the country.

About Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by David Eltis and David Richardson

Between 1501 and 1867, the transatlantic slave trade claimed an estimated 12.5 million Africans and involved almost every country with an Atlantic coastline. In this extraordinary book, two leading historians have created the first comprehensive, up-to-date atlas on this 350-year history of kidnapping and coercion. It features nearly 200 maps, especially created for the volume, that explore every detail of the African slave traffic to the New World. The atlas is based on an online database (www.slavevoyages.org) with records on nearly 35,000 slaving voyages – roughly 80 percent of all such voyages ever made. Using maps, David Eltis and David Richardson show which nations participated in the slave trade, where the ships involved were outfitted, where the captives boarded ship, and where they landed in the Americas, as well as the experience of the transatlantic voyage and the geographic dimensions of the eventual abolition of the traffic. Accompanying the maps are illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries, intended to enhance readers’ understanding of the human story underlying the trade from its inception to its end.

Mapping Specialists Ltd. is proud to provide the cartography for this amazing project.

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