Kathleen DuVal has won the Cundill History Prize, given annually to a book “that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal,” for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.
DuVal’s book, published in April by Random House, explores the power of the Indigenous nations in North America before and after European colonization. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book as “a revelatory account of the power and influence of Indigenous peoples in North America.”
Historian Rana Mitter, the chair of the prize jury, said in a statement, “One of the most wonderful things about Native Nations by Katheleen DuVal is that it brings unexpected and, to many readers, unknown aspects of that story, to prominence. She does this by bringing in historians and analysts of the Indigenous American experience from within their own scholarship, bringing the story to the forefront of our wider understanding in this huge sweeping history that starts more than 1000 years ago and brings us up to the present day.”
DuVal won the award over two other finalists: Gary J. Bass for Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia and Dylan C. Penningroth for Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.
The Cundill History Prize was established in 2008 and is administered by McGill University in Montreal. Previous winners include Anne Applebaum for Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956and Tania Branigan for Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
