Bowdoin Professor of History Patrick Rael has been selected as one of five finalists for the Harriet Tubman Prize, which honors nonfiction books that examine slavery, the slave trade, or anti-slavery movements in the Atlantic World.

Rael’s new book, Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1875, shows how African Americans used their revolutionary ideals of self-rule and universal equality to slowly turn American opinion against slave interests in the South, according to a New York Public Library summary.

The $7,500 award will be presented on Dec. 12 by The New York Library’s Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Read more about Eighty-eight Years.