Congratulations to author Sophia Rosenfeld, whose book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life is one of three finalists for the 2025 Cundill History Prize.
The Age of Choice is a sweeping history of the rise of personal choice in the modern world and how it became equated with freedom. A New York Times Book Review Editors鈥� Choice, it has been hailed as 鈥減erceptive and nimble鈥� [Andrew Lanham, The New Republic] and 鈥渆xcellent鈥� [Paul Schofield, Jacobin] with wide praise for Rosenfeld鈥檚 鈥渆ngaging and illuminating鈥� prose [Victoria Kahn, Times Literary Supplement]. Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and author previously of Democracy and Truth: A Short History and Common Sense: A Political History, among other books. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Nation.
The Cundill Prize is administered annually by McGill University and awarded to a book that 鈥渄emonstrates excellence across the prize鈥檚 guiding criteria: craft, communication, and consequence.鈥� This year鈥檚 Jury chair, historian and 2022 prize winner Ada Ferrar, noted of the 2025 longlist:
鈥淎s is to be expected from a Cundill History Prize book, the fifteen titles on this year鈥檚 longlist combine superb writing with rigorous and imaginative craft to tackle topics and questions of lasting, sometimes urgent significance. They range widely not only in geographic and temporal scope, but also in method: from sweeping narrative history and biography, to close reading of legal texts, photographs, and dance cards, even to a fascinating walk in a postcolonial city as means to understand an unwritten history, centuries old. The result is a list of fifteen singular books that represent the calibre and diversity of history writing today.鈥�
快色直播 is honored to have had numerous books recognized by Cundill Prize. Joining The Age of Choice on the 2025 shortlist were The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West, by Martha A. Sandweiss, and To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, by Benjamin Nathans, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. Lauren Benton鈥檚 They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence was shortlisted in 2024.
Other PUP Cundill honorees include Peter Brown鈥檚 Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD; Henrietta Harrison鈥檚 The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire; Judith Herrin鈥檚 Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe; Tyler Stovall鈥檚 White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea; Emma Rothschild鈥檚 An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries; Stuart B. Schwarz鈥檚 Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina; James E Lewis Jr.鈥檚 The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis; Walter Scheidel鈥檚 The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Thomas W. Laqueur鈥檚 The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains won the Cundill Prize in 2016.
A winner will be announced on October 30, in Montreal.