RELATED: Photos from the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Ceremony

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History’s ceremony Thursday awarding the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, which it co-sponsors with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, was a celebration of scholarly pursuit in its most vigorous and fresh form. The winner of the ninth annual award, which comes with a $25,000 cash prize, was Christopher Leslie Brown, for his first book, “Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism,” published in 2006 by University of North Carolina Press.

Mr. Brown demonstrated some of the force of his personality by attending the ceremony at the Yale Club with a bad case of the flu. But his biography stands on its own merits: A defensive back for the football team at Yale and a Rhodes Scholar, he returned from Oxford to America with his Ph.D. to work for the Treasury Department, before returning to academe. He is now a visiting professor at Columbia University. His mother, Carolyn Brown, traced his obsession with information to his childhood command of statistics related to the Washington Redskins.

“Moral Capital” is a riveting account of how the British anti-slavery movement came to be and how it succeeded, drawing on political, economic, religious, and social history. Time and again, the author cuts through previous explanations, breaking them down assumption by assumption to unveil a new truth.

David Blight, the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, a co-sponsor of the event, praised the book for its “original argument,” “take no prisoner footnotes,” “textured explanation,” and “insight.”

“He has a certain intensity. It’s reflected in his writing: Every single sentence is sculpted so its absolutely perfect,” the director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Ronald Hoffman, said. “He could spend a week on a paragraph.” Mr. Brown worked on the book as a fellow of the Omohundro Institute.

To experience the book’s brilliance, one need only read the first paragraph, one of the judges of the prize, an assistant professor of history and African-American studies at Yale, Edward Rugemer, said.

Mr. Brown said when he began the book, he naively hoped he would understand what gives political movements their moral clarity and sense of urgency. He admitted his book does not go that far. But its explanation of how one nation’s citizens suddenly righted an injustice of which they’d long been aware is undeniably relevant today.

Among the attendees were one of two finalists for the prize, Cassandra Pybus, author of “Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty” (the other finalist, Matt Childs, author of “The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery” was unable to attend because of the imminent birth of his child); several students at Frederick Douglass Academy, a public school sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute; the historian of slavery who taught Mr. Brown as an undergraduate, David Brion Davis; the executive director of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, James Basker, and Mr. Brown’s wife, Hilary-Anne Hallett, who is working on a book on early Hollywood.

agordon@nysun.com