Chandra Manning, author of What this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, has been selected by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition as a finalist for the Tenth Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African-American experience.

The $25,000 annual award for the year's best non-fiction book on the subject of slavery and/or abolition and antislavery movements is the most generous history prize in its field. The prize winner will be announced following the Douglass Prize Review Committee meeting in September, and the award will be presented at a dinner at the Yale Club of New York on February 19, 2009.

The Frederick Douglass Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments.