2011 Cundill Prize Short List Announced
Cundill Prize to be Announced Sunday, November 13. Learn more
See press release: 2011 Cundill Prize Short List
Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Random House of Canada) / UK title: Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire (HarperPress) by Professor Maya Jasanoff
Book Overview: At the end of the American Revolution, some sixty thousand loyalists—one in forty members of the American population—decided to leave their homes and become refugees elsewhere in the British Empire. They sailed for Britain, for Canada, for Jamaica, and for the Bahamas; some ventured as far as Sierra Leone and India. Wherever they went, the voyage out of America was a fresh beginning, and it carried them into a dynamic if uncertain new world.Yet as they dispersed across the empire, the loyalists also carried things from their former homes, revealing an enduring American influence on the wider British world. A groundbreaking history of the revolutionary era, Liberty’s Exiles tells the story of this remarkable global diaspora. Through painstaking archival research and vivid storytelling, award-winning historian Maya Jasanoff re-creates the journeys of ordinary individuals whose lives were overturned by extraordinary events. Ambitious, original, and personality-filled, Liberty’s Exiles is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative new analysis—a book that explores an unknown dimension of America’s founding to illuminate the meanings of liberty itself.
Maya Jasanoff was educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and Yale, and is currently a professor of history at Harvard University. Her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850, was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year selection in numerous publications including The Economist, The Guardian, and The Sunday Times(London). She has recently been a fellow of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the American Council of Learned Societies and has contributed essays to the London Review of Books, The New York TimesMagazine, and The New York Review of Books.
Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Ageby Professor Sergio Luzzatto (Metropolitan Books)
Book Overview: The first historical appraisal of the astonishing life and times of a controversial twentieth-century saintPadre Pio is one of the world's most beloved holy figures, more popular in Italy than the Virgin Mary and even Jesus. His tomb is the most visited Catholic shrine anywhere, drawing more devotees than Lourdes. His miraculous feats included the ability to fly and to be present in two places at once; an apparition of Padre Pio in midair prevented Allied warplanes from dropping bombs on his hometown. Most notable of all were his stigmata, which provoke heated controversy to this day. Were they truly God-given? A psychosomatic response to extreme devotion? Or, perhaps, the self-inflicted wounds of a charlatan? Now acclaimed historian Sergio Luzzatto offers a pioneering investigation of this remarkable man and his followers. Neither a worshipful hagiography nor a sensationalist exposé, "Padre Pio" is a nuanced examination of the persistence of mysticism in contemporary society and a striking analysis of the links between Catholicism and twentieth-century politics. Granted unprecedented access to the Vatican archives, Luzzatto has also unearthed a letter from Padre Pio himself in which the monk asks for a secret delivery of carbolic acid —- a discovery which helps explain why two successive popes regarded Padre Pio as a fraud, until pressure from Pio-worshipping pilgrims forced the Vatican to change its views.
A profoundly original tale of wounds and wonder, salvation and swindle, "Padre Pio" explores what it really means to be a saint in our time.
Sergio Luzzato is a professor of modern history at the University of Turin, Italy. He is the author of four works of history, and a regular contributor to the leading Italian dailies La Stampa and Corriere della Sera. He lives in Italy.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin byMr. Timothy Snyder (Basic Books)
Book Overview: An account of the atrocities committed in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive,Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.
Timothy Snyder received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. He has held fellowships in Paris and Vienna, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He is the author ofNationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (Harvard University Press, 1998, Halecki Prize); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999(Yale University Press, 2003, awards from American Historical Association, American Association for Ukrainian Studies, Przeglad Wschodni, and Marie Curie-Sklodowska University); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (Yale University Press, 2005, Pro Historia Polonorum award); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of A Habsburg Archduke(Basic Books, 2008), and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010). He is also the co-editor of Wall Around the West: State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). His most recent book is Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, a history of Nazi and Soviet mass killing on the lands between Berlin and Moscow. A New York Times bestseller and a book of the year according to The Atlantic, The Independent, The Financial Times, the Telegraph, The Economist, History Today, the Seattle Times and the New Statesman. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern East European political history.
********************************************************************************************
Thursday, October 7, 2010
FINALISTS ANNOUNCED FOR 2010 CUNDILL PRIZE IN HISTORY
Download Full Press Release [.pdf]
The jury for the Cundill Prize in History at McGill, the world's largest non-fiction historical literature prize, has announced the short list for this year's prize. The prize, now in its third year, will award one full prize of $75,000 U.S. and two "Recognition of Excellence" awards of $10,000 U.S on November 14 in Montreal, Canada.
The short list of three books was chosen from 181 eligible entries submitted to the Prize representing some 85 publishing houses from around the world.
The three authors selected as finalists for the 2010 Cundill Prize in History are:
GIANCARLO CASALE
The Ottoman Age of Exploration
(Oxford University Press (USA))
Click title for book homepage
The Ottoman Age of Exploration is the first comprehensive historical account of this century-long struggle for global dominance, a struggle that raged from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Malacca, and from the interior of Africa to the steppes of Central Asia. Based on extensive research in the archives of Turkey and Portugal, as well as materials written on three continents and in a half dozen languages, it presents an unprecedented picture of the global reach of the Ottoman state during the sixteenth century. It does so through a dramatic recounting of the lives of sultans and viziers, spies, corsairs, soldiers-of-fortune, and women from the imperial harem. Challenging traditional narratives of Western dominance, it argues that the Ottomans were not only active participants in the Age of Exploration, but ultimately bested the Portuguese in the game of global politics by using sea power, dynastic prestige, and commercial savoir faire to create their own imperial dominion throughout the Indian Ocean.
Giancarlo Casale is Associate Professor of the History of the Islamic World and the 2009-2011 McKnight Land Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota.
DIARMAID MACCULLOCH
A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
(Allen Lane)
Click title for book homepage
Christianity, one of the world's great religions, has had an incalculable impact on human history. This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organisation and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society. Diarmaid MacCulloch ranges from Palestine in the first century to India in the third, from Damascus to China in the seventh century and from San Francisco to Korea in the twentieth. He is one of the most widely travelled of Christian historians and conveys a sense of place as arrestingly as he does the power of ideas. He presents the development of Christian history differently from any of his predecessors. He shows how, after a semblance of unity in its earliest centuries, the Christian church divided during the next 1400 years into three increasingly distanced parts, of which the western Church was by no means always the most important: he observes that at the end of the first eight centuries of Christian history, Baghdad might have seemed a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. This is the first truly global history of Christianity.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is a fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University.
MARLA R. MILLER
Betsy Ross and the Making of America
(Henry Holt and Company)
Click title for book homepage
Betsy Ross and the Making of America is the first comprehensively researched and elegantly written biography of one of America's most captivating figures of the Revolutionary War. Drawing on new sources and bringing a fresh, keen eye to the fabled creation of "the first flag," Marla R. Miller thoroughly reconstructs the life behind the legend. This authoritative work provides a close look at the famous seamstress while shedding new light on the lives of the artisan families who peopled the young nation and crafted its tools, ships, and homes.
Marla R. Miller is an associate professor of history and the Director of the public history program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.