Winner, 2015 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University
Freedom's Mirror offers "a fresh perspective and links these two nations together in a complex web, in which sugar slavery declined in Haiti just as it rose in Cuba," commented the jury. "Ferrer's research is most impressive, she fills her pages with proslavery Cuban generals, African slaves in both colonies, refugee 'French Negroes,' and Haitian leaders who hoped to weaken slavery on the islands that surrounded them.Freedom's Mirror will force even specialists to reconsider this era," At the same time, "one of Ferrer's greatest successes is her rendering of the complex politics in a beautifully written and understandable way that will be readily followed by readers with minimal knowledge of nineteenth-century Cuba, Haiti, and the Spanish Caribbean."

The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field of slavery and abolition by honoring outstanding books on the subject. The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers, and orators of the nineteenth century.


Winner, 2015 Friedrich Katz Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in Latin American History
Ada Ferrer has crafted a work of remarkable insight and methodological brilliance. Many evoke Haiti's hemispheric significance as an impulse for liberation and conservative re-entrenchment; no one so meticulously traces the interdependencies of freedom and enslavement, incorporating diplomatic, military, and social history as well as extraordinarily imaginative textual analysis. Ferrer's chapter on the Aponte rebellion is a tour de force, ingeniously unraveling the enigmatic strands that bound Haiti, Cuba, and the African diaspora in the Age of Revolution.


Winner, 2015 James Rawley Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in Atlantic World History
Winner, 2015, Wesley Logan Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in the History of the African Diaspora
Winner, 2015, Haiti Illumination Prize from the Haitian Studies Association for the best book in Haitian Studies
Honorable Mention, PROSE Award in European and World History, Association of American Publishers