Washington Book Prize Finalists

In my weekly “Sunday Night Odds and Ends” post, I mentioned that the C.V. Starr Center, in conjunction with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Mount Vernon, have announced the three finalists for the George Washington Book Prize:

The $50,000 award—co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon—is the largest prize nationwide for a book on early American history, and one of the largest literary prizes of any kind. It recognizes the year’s best books on the nation’s founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history.

This year’s finalists are:

Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton)

Kevin J. Hayes’s The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford)

Jane Kamensky’s The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (Viking).

The winner will be announced on May 28th at Mt. Vernon.