In August 2024, Gloria Whiting published her first book, Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England, which explores how Black New Englanders maintained a sense of belonging among their kin in the face of slavery.
The book was one of four finalists for the 2025 Frederick Douglass Prize, an annual award presented by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale that “recognizes an outstanding non-fiction book in English published on the subject of slavery, resistance, and/or abolition.” Whiting also received the AHA Prize in American History for an outstanding first book on any subject relating to US History.
Belonging received The John Winthrop Prize in Early New England History, awarded by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. This award is given for the “best work dealing with the history and cultures of the peoples who shaped the region now known as New England in times leading up to and including the seventeenth century.” It also received the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize by the Massachusetts Historical Society for the best nonfiction book on the history of Massachusetts.
Whiting was also awarded the 2025 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians for best historical monograph published in 2024, which as WAWH explains, “recognizes the best single-authored, original research based monograph in the field of history.” Belonging was also shortlisted for the Museum of African American History’s Stone Book Award for exceptional scholarship in the field of African American history and culture.
You can learn more about Belonging at University of Pennsylvania Press.