September 5, 2024, 3:00am

Today, McGill University announced the shortlist for the 2024 Cundill History Prize, honoring books that “speak to major issues in the present day.” The winner, judged on “historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and diverse appeal,” will be announced next month, and will take home a prize of $75,000.

“One element that stands out among the brilliant books on this shortlist is their timeliness,” said Rana Mitter, this year’s jury chair, in a press release. “Although all are products of years of deep research, they touch on topics—the balance between freedom and responsibility, the need to account for and atone for war, the continuing rise of the Global South—that speak to major issues in the present day.”

“All eight books on the shortlist radically rethink and reinterpret topics that appear familiar but that are in fact either misunderstood or partially understood,” added juror Moses Ochonu. “In that sense, they demonstrate that great history is not only defined by topical novelty but also by analytical creativity—by the historian’s ability to reintroduce us to a seemingly familiar subject through a fresh new look and the exploration of an unfamiliar angle.”

Here’s the shortlist:

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

Lauren Benton, They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence
(Princeton University Press)

Joya Chatterji, Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century
(The Bodley Head, VINTAGE / Yale University Press)

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

Andrew C. McKevitt, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America
(University of North Carolina Press)

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

Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination
(Alfred A. Knopf)

David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay, Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
(The Bodley Head, VINTAGE / W. W. Norton)