George Washington Book Prize Nominees for 2023

Mount Vernon has announced the nominees for the 2023 George Washington Book Prize.

There will be an author event at the site on 24 August, and the winner will be announced on 21 September in New York City, home of the cosponsoring Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. (The third cosponsor in Washington College in Maryland.)

Here are this year’s nominated books.

Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution by Mary Sarah Bilder, the Founders Professor of Law at Boston College Law School. Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor was a path-breaking female educator who lectured at the University of Pennsylvania during the Constitutional Convention to an audience that included George Washington and other delegates. Bilder argues that Harriot, as the first such female public lecturer in America, inspired the gender-neutral language of the Constitution.

His Masterly Pen: A Biography of Jefferson the Writer by Fred Kaplan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. This book is an appreciation of Jefferson’s writing skills as key to his personality and public career. Though he could wield his pen with unrivaled power, he was also a master of using words to both reveal and conceal from others and himself the complications, the inconsistencies, and the contradictions between his principles and his policies.

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a past George Washington Prize. Here we see Adams’s transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical. Shrewd, eloquent, and intensely disciplined, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history. He packaged and amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool in an innovative arsenal to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind creating a country.

First among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity by Maurizio Valsania, professor of American History at the University of Turin. Washington is frequently portrayed as tremendously effective in action, but this aggressive and muscular vision is largely a creation of the nineteenth century. Eighteenth-century ideals of upper-class masculinity preferred a man with refined aesthetic tastes, graceful and elegant movements, and the ability and willingness to clearly articulate his emotions. Valsania considers Washington’s complexity and how his real life diverges from the legend.