"Island on Fire" by Tom Zoellner, MALS ’12, WINS National Book Critics Circle Award

Tom Zoellner, a visiting professor and 2012 graduate of the Masters of Liberal Studies Program (MALS), has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best nonfiction book of 2020. Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Harvard University Press) chronicles the rebellion led by Samuel Sharpe, an enslaved Jamaican activist and Baptist deacon. 

 “Zoellner makes deft use of primary sources, and illustrates how the atmosphere of energetic political reform and events like Sharpe’s rebellion converged to end slavery in the ‘agricultural prison camp’ of Jamaica, and in the British Empire at large.”—The New Yorker  

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