October 3, 2024, 7:52am

Today, McGill University announced the finalists for the 2024 Cundill History Prize, which celebrates books that “speak to major issues in the present day.” Finalists will each receive $10,000; the winner, judged on “historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and diverse appeal,” will take home a prize of $75,000.

“The fierce urgency of history: that’s the force that runs through all three of our Cundill finalists,” said historian Rana Mitter, jury chair, in a press release. “Each one is a brilliantly crafted, deeply researched work of historical scholarship. But each also speaks to issues that are still very much with us in the world of the 21st century—tense geopolitics, questions of law, rights, and society, and above all, the complex and often counterintuitive interactions of human beings in the past that illuminate the present.”

The winner will be announced at a ceremony in Montreal on October 30. In the meantime, congratulations to the three finalists:

Gary J. Bass, Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
(Picador, Pan Macmillan)

Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
(Penguin Random House)

Dylan C. Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
(Liveright Publishing)