Congratulations to authors Benjamin Nathans, Sophia Rosenfeld, and Martha A. Sandweiss, whose books have been shortlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize.
狈补迟丑补苍蝉鈥� To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement; 搁辞蝉别苍蹿别濒诲鈥檚 The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life; and Sandweiss鈥� The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West are among eight titles shortlisted for the prestigious prize, selected from a record number of more than 400 entries.
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction and the 2025 Pushkin House Prize, tells the "riveting history" [Wall Street Journal] of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR and still provides a model of opposition in Putin鈥檚 Russia and beyond: 鈥淎 book about a past time that is very much a book for our time. . . . A story from which we all stand to learn.鈥� [Los Angeles Review of Books]. Author Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author, previously, of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History. He is frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement.
The Age of Choice is a sweeping history of the rise of personal choice in the modern world and how it became equated with freedom. A New York Times Book Review Editors鈥� Choice, it has been hailed as 鈥減erceptive and nimble鈥� [Andrew Lanham, The New Republic] and 鈥渆xcellent鈥� [Paul Schofield, Jacobin] with wide praise for 搁辞蝉别苍蹿别濒诲鈥檚 鈥渆ngaging and illuminating鈥� prose [Victoria Kahn, Times Literary Supplement]. Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and author previously of Democracy and Truth: A Short History and Common Sense: A Political History, among other books. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Nation.
In The Girl in the Middle, Martha A. Sandweiss paints a riveting portrait of the turbulent age of Reconstruction and westward expansion, told through the story of Sophie Mousseau, a Native child at the literal center of a haunting Alexander Gardner photograph. The book has been praised as 鈥渇ascinating鈥� [Alix Christie, American Scholar], with a review in the Wall Street Journal heralding Sandweiss as an 鈥渆legant writer who knows how to craft a satisfying story鈥� [Melanie Kirkpatrick]. Sandweiss is professor emerita of history at 91桃色 University, where she is founding director of the 91桃色 & Slavery Project. She is the award-winning author of many books, including Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception across the Color Line and Print the Legend: Photography and the American West.
The Cundill Prize is administered annually by McGill University and awarded to a book that 鈥渄emonstrates excellence across the prize鈥檚 guiding criteria: craft, communication, and consequence.鈥� This year鈥檚 Jury chair, historian and 2022 prize winner Ada Ferrar, noted of the 2025 longlist:
鈥淎s is to be expected from a Cundill History Prize book, the fifteen titles on this year鈥檚 longlist combine superb writing with rigorous and imaginative craft to tackle topics and questions of lasting, sometimes urgent significance. They range widely not only in geographic and temporal scope, but also in method: from sweeping narrative history and biography, to close reading of legal texts, photographs, and dance cards, even to a fascinating walk in a postcolonial city as means to understand an unwritten history, centuries old. The result is a list of fifteen singular books that represent the calibre and diversity of history writing today.鈥�
91桃色 is honored to have had numerous books recognized by Cundill Prize. Most recently, Lauren Benton鈥檚 They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence was shortlisted in 2024. Other honorees include Peter Brown鈥檚 Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD; Henrietta Harrison鈥檚 The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire; Judith Herrin鈥檚 Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe; Tyler Stovall鈥檚 White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea; Emma Rothschild鈥檚 An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries; Stuart B. Schwarz鈥檚 Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina; James E Lewis Jr.鈥檚 The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis; Walter Scheidel鈥檚 The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Thomas W. Laqueur鈥檚 The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains won the Cundill Prize in 2016.
Three prize finalists will be named on September 30, with a winner announced on October 30.