Tera Hunter wins Organization of American Historians prize for book on slave marriage

By Denise Valenti for the Office of Communications on April 17, 2018, 3:36 p.m.
Tera Hunter

Tera Hunter

Photo courtesy of the Department of African American Studies

Tera Hunter, a professor of history and African American studies at Princeton, has been awarded the Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians (OAH) for her 2017 book, “Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century.”

Hunter researched court records, legal documents and personal diaries to illustrate the constraints that slavery placed on intimate relationships. Her own great-great-grandparents, Ellen and Moses Hunter, were enslaved, freed and then married during Reconstruction.

The Nickliss Prize is given for the most original book in U.S. women’s and/or gender history, and it acknowledges the generations of women whose opportunities were constrained by the historical circumstances in which they lived. The award was presented to Hunter on April 14 at the 2018 OAH Annual Meeting in Sacramento, California.

 

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