The Book Prize Index

The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits

Tiya Miles

Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the American Book Award Winner of the Merle Curti Social History Award Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize Winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction) Finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize Finalist for the Cundill History Prize A New York Times Editor’s Choice selection “If many Americans imagine slavery essentially as a system in which black men toiled on cotton plantations, Miles upends that stereotype several times over.” —New York Times Book Review “[Miles] has compiled documentation that does for Detroit what the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives did for other regions, primarily the South.”

Race & EthnicityRace & Ethnicity · medium confidenceRace & Ethnicity81 signalsLlm Classifier: Race & Ethnicity -> Race & EthnicityKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryKeyword Classifier: Race & Ethnicity -> Race & EthnicityBlack History & CultureSlavery & EmancipationAmerican Civil War

Award History

1 wins · 2 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
Frederick Douglass Book Prize: Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition2018Co-winnerSecondary source
Cundill History PrizeMajor2018LonglistSecondary source
View all award history (2)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Detroit62%
    • the city of the Straits36%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.

    This suggestion did not meet the normal display threshold and is more likely to be wrong.

    The book argues that slavery and freedom in Detroit should not be understood mainly through cotton-plantation stereotypes, because documentation shows a different regional experience.

    Model confidence 52%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    40 / 100 academic

    Serious trade

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 58%.