2024 Winner
Kathleen DuVal -
Native Nations: A Millenium in North America
Biography
Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches early American and American Indian history. Her previous work includes Independence Lost, which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize, and The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. She is also a coauthor of Give Me Liberty! and coeditor of Interpreting a Continent: Voices from Colonial America.
Book Summary
A sweeping 1,000-year history of the power of Indigenous North America, from ancient cities to fights for sovereignty that continue today.
Finalist
Gary J. Bass -
Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
Biography
Gary J. Bass is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of The Blood Telegram, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Book Summary
Gary J. Bass’ Judgement at Tokyo is a magnificent, riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the postwar era in the Asia–Pacific.
Finalist
Dylan C. Penningroth -
Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
Biography
Dylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley. A MacArthur Prize fellow and author of The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South.
Book Summary
Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life--a vision allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”
