Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize Awarded
Gloria McCahon Whiting recognized for Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England.
The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) has awarded the 2025 Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize to Gloria McCahon Whiting for her book Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England, published in 2024 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The Gomes Prize is given to the best nonfiction work on the history of Massachusetts published during the preceding year. Whiting will receive the award at an event in 2026.
The Peter J. Gomes Book Prize selection committee reviewed 14 submissions before awarding the prize to Whiting. Each year, the committee, composed entirely of non-MHS scholars, reviews original research in the form of a monograph or edited volume related to Massachusetts history through any period of its existence. This year’s committee members praised Belonging for being “deeply researched” and “remarkably attuned to the particular, local, and personal even as it makes clear and bold larger arguments.” They were particularly impressed by its ability to “reframe the history of slavery in early New England around the family” in addition to making “a novel, persuasive case that emancipation of enslaved people in Massachusetts occurred not primarily as a result of judicial intervention or the Massachusetts State Constitution of 1780, but rather due to the persistence with which Black men and women insisted on their rights to remain close to their families.”
The committee found that Whiting “grounds these accounts in immensely readable and grounded narratives. She takes readers into the streets of colonial Boston and its surrounding environs to establish where and how a budding romantic relationship began; which neighbors would have arrived to assist with childbirth; and how a mother separated from her children might have maintained relationships with them.” Declaring this a “landmark history of slavery in colonial Boston and its geographies of bondage and resistance,” the committee members unanimously voted to award this year’s Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize to Prof. Gloria McCahon Whiting.
The committee commented on a very strong field of applicants and would like to recognize Shaun S. Nichols, author of Manufacturing Catastrophe: Massachusetts and the Making of Global Capitalism, 1813 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), as the finalist for the 2025 Gomes Prize. According to the committee, Nichols’ work “is valuable as a model for understanding the difficulties that smaller traditional industrial communities have faced in adapting to the global innovation-based economy.” Manufacturing Catastrophe “breaks new ground in complicating conventional narratives of deindustrialization in the United States.”
Gloria McCahon Whiting is the E. Gordon Fox Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include the history of race, slavery, and gender in early America. Prof. Whiting is also leading a digital humanities project titled “Freedom Seekers: Stories of Black Liberation in the American Revolutionary Era and Beyond.” Belonging, Prof. Whiting’s first published monograph, has been awarded the John Winthrop Prize from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians.
Shaun S. Nichols is an Associate Professor of History at Boise State University where he teaches courses on the history of capitalism, labor, and immigration in the United States and the world.
About the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize
The Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize, for the best nonfiction work on the history of Massachusetts published during the preceding year, honors the memory of a respected Harvard scholar and beloved Fellow of the MHS. Peter J. Gomes (1942-2011) was elected to the MHS in 1976 and joined the Board of Overseers in 2010. He was Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University.
