September 2, 2025, 3:00am

Today, McGill University announced the shortlist for the 2025 Cundill History Prize, which honors history writing that “demonstrates excellence across the prize’s guiding criteria: craft, communication and consequence.” The winner will take home a prize of $75,000; two runners-up will receive $10,000 each.

“This year’s Cundill History Prize shortlist demonstrates that great works of history come in many forms,” said juror François Furstenberg, Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at John Hopkins University, in a statement. “Some approach their subjects biographically, while others offer vast geographic or thematic frames. Some use tiny details to make monumental claims, while others offer fresh interpretations of well-known historical events. All are brilliantly written. All break new ground. None will fail to impress.”

The three finalists will be announced on Tuesday, September 30, and the winner on Thursday, October 30 as part of the Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal. In the meantime, here’s the shortlist:

Emily Callaci, Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise
(Allen Lane)

Kornel Chang, A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under US Occupation
(The Belknap Press of Harvard University)

Marlene L. Daut, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe
(Knopf)

Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World
(Penguin Press)

Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
(Princeton University Press)

Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War
(John Murray Press)

Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
(Princeton University Press)

Martha A. Sandweiss, The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West
(Princeton University Press)