News Release - The Huntington Names Winner of 2023 Shapiro Book Prize

SAN MARINO, Calif.—R. Isabela Morales is the winner of the 2023 Shapiro Book Prize, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens announced today. Morales won for her 2022 monograph Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oxford University Press), and the prize carries with it a $10,000 cash award. A public historian, Morales is the editor and project manager of the Princeton & Slavery Project and the digital projects manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum in Skillman, New Jersey.

The review committee for the prize described Happy Dreams of Liberty as “beautifully written and utterly engrossing” and “a work of prodigious research.” The book follows the remarkable story of the descendants of Samuel Townsend, a wealthy plantation owner who upon his death granted emancipation to his enslaved children and nieces, leaving them with a net worth of approximately $200,000. Happy Dreams of Liberty “draws on a rich cache of letters written by the Townsend children themselves, as it chronicles their odyssey across the country in search of freedom, equality, and belonging.”

In Happy Dreams of Liberty, the committee said, the vivid and revealing account of a single family ultimately addresses much broader social concerns, as it illuminates the transformative times and multiple geographies of freedom that shaped the lives of the Townsends—whose heritage shielded them from discrimination in some parts of the West, but put them on the wrong side of the rigid racial lines that dominated the Jim Crow South.

“I have always been drawn to narrative history and family stories like that of the Townsends, and having The Huntington recognize their significance with this prize is an incredible honor,” Morales said. “As a public historian, my focus is making scholarly research accessible to broader audiences. That’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in family stories. They have a power to draw readers in and make them feel connected to the past in a deeper way. The Townsends may have lived and died more than 150 years ago, but their pursuit of social and economic mobility and their experience of racism and prejudice in the 19th century remain highly relevant today.”

Established in 2019 as a part of The Shapiro Center for American History and Culture at The Huntington, the Shapiro Book Prize is awarded biennially for an outstanding first scholarly monograph in American political, social, intellectual, or cultural history, with a focus on books that make exceptional use of primary source materials. A committee of distinguished scholars in the field selected Morales’ book from over 50 submissions from a wide range of book publishers.