The Award Tally
FictionNonfiction

Wishlist

Saved in this browser only - it isn't synced to your other devices.

Back to the full ranking
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America cover

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Clint Smith

1

award won

15

score

#276 of 3,809 books · #94 in History

Won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (2021). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 1 other award.

How the Word Is Passed won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Stowe Prize, and the 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, and was a #1 New York Times bestseller. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.

Buy this book at AmazonAd
Publisher
Hachette UK
ISBN-13
9780316492911
Genre
History
Topics
Slavery in AmericaHistorical memory and monumentsRace and American identity
Featured on
The Long Road to Freedom: Prize-Winning Books About Slavery

Other awarded books from Clint Smith

Clint Smith has no other awarded or shortlisted books yet.

If you liked How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, you could also like these

Similar Topics