Shapiro Book Prize
Ashley Brown Wins 2025 Shapiro Book Prize
The Huntington has awarded the 2025 Shapiro Book Prize to Ashley Brown for her biography Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson (Oxford University Press, 2023). The biennial prize, which includes a $10,000 cash award, honors an outstanding first scholarly monograph in American history and culture.
This year’s selection committee described Serving Herself as a story that operates on multiple levels, highlighting not only Gibson’s exceptional career as an elite athlete but also the broader complexities of sports integration and women’s pursuits of athletic careers. The committee noted that the book explores these themes against the backdrop of “the struggles of African Americans during the Great Migration and Civil Rights era.” Calling the work “history at its best,” the committee lauded Brown’s profound engagement with diverse archival materials.
Ashley Brown won the 2025 Shapiro Book Prize for her book Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson. | Photo: Dave Giroux of Dave Giroux Photography. Book: Oxford University Press.
Finalists for the 2025 Shapiro Book Prize
The committee recognized six finalists for their outstanding contributions (listed alphabetically by authors’ last names):
- Ashley Brown, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson (Oxford University Press, 2023)
- Adrian De Leon, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023)
- Holly Miowak Guise, Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II (University of Washington Press, 2024)
- Sheyda F.A. Jahanbani, The Poverty of the World: Rediscovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1941–1968 (Oxford University Press, 2023)
- Giuliana Perrone, Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
- Whitney Barlow Robles, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History (Yale University Press, 2023)
Previous Shapiro Book Prize Winners
The Shapiro Book Prize was established in 2019 as a part of the Shapiro Center for American History and Culture at The Huntington, which was created to advance scholarship, knowledge, and understanding of American history and culture—especially of the early republic and of the nation’s founders and leaders.
2023 Winner: R. Isabela Morales
Winner of the 2023 Shapiro Book Prize for Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2022), R. Isabela Morales discusses the significance of writing family history, the challenges of tracing the lives of enslaved people, and the unpublished letters and legal documents that form the archival core of her book.
2021 Winner: Benjamin Francis-Fallon
Professor Benjamin Francis-Fallon, winner of The Huntington’s inaugural Shapiro Book Prize for The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History (Harvard University Press, 2019), discusses how Latina/o leaders in the United States first came to see themselves as belonging to one political community, exploring their attempts to establish mutual bonds and pass legislation.