2022 WinnerTiya Miles -
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
Biography
Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History, Radcliffe Alumnae Professor, and Director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. Miles is the author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, a New York Times bestseller that won the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction among several other prizes.
She is the author of five other acclaimed and prize-winning books, including The Dawn of Detroit, Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose, and Tales from the Haunted South. Miles writes about race, culture, history and the environment for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and other publications. She is originally from Ohio and now lives in Cambridge, Mass. with her family.
Book Summary
Tiya Miles traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives. All That She Carried honours the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so.
FinalistAda Ferrer -
Cuba: An American History
Biography
Ada Ferrer is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she has taught since 1995.
She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, winner of the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University as well as multiple prizes from the American Historical Association.
Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, she has been traveling to and conducting research on the island since 1990.
Book Summary
Ada Ferrer's Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade.
FinalistVladislav Zubok -
Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
Biography
Vladislav M. Zubok is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of A Failed Empire, Zhivago’s Children, and The Idea of Russia.
Book Summary
A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union, showing how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms led to its demise, Vladislav Zubok's Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances - and the fragility of authoritarian state power.
