The George Washington Prize is an annual literary award recognizing the past year’s finest works focused on the nation’s founding era, especially works that help advance a broader public understanding of early American history.

Blaakman's first book investigates a frenzied land rush that swept the United States during its first quarter-century. Chronicling white Americans’ attempts to make the seizure and public sale of Native American land a basis for republican statecraft, the book uncovers the revolutionary origins of a real-estate bonanza that stretched across millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and Georgia to the Great Lakes.

Blaakman is a historian of revolutionary and early national America. His scholarship focuses on politics, empires, and North American borderlands, and his interests extend to include gender history, the history of capitalism, and microhistory.

The George Washington Prize winner will be announced at a gala dinner at Mount Vernon on Sept. 21.