Enfilade

From Penguin Random House:

Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (New York: Random House, 2024), 752 pages, ISBN: 978-0525511038, $38.

Finalist for the Cundill History Prize

Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.

A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America. So, when Europeans showed up in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand—those having developed differently from their own—and whose power they often underestimated.

For centuries afterward, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch—and influenced global markets—and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists. Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to command much of the continent’s land and resources. Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions. The Cherokees created institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory.

In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal shows how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant—and will continue far into the future.

Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches early American and American Indian history. Her previous work includes Independence Lost, which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize, and The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. She is a coauthor of Give Me Liberty! and coeditor of Interpreting a Continent: Voices from Colonial America.

From the press release for the shortlist, as shared on 15 September; the winner will be announced 15 November.

The Walpole Society has recently announced the shortlist for the Berger Prize, the most prestigious book prize for art history, including a major publication on Gwen John, one of the most significant British women artists of the 20th century, and a book which explores the role that art played in destabilising the legitimacy of the one of the most powerful corporations in history: the East India Company.

A lifetime of knowledge is gifted to the reader in Steven Brindle’s monumental Architecture in Britain and Ireland 1530–1830 (Paul Mellon Centre). From its brilliant opening introduction this magisterial overview sets the national architectural story alight and the reader is struck by the scale and the sweep of history that Brindle handles with consummate skill, revealing a lifetime of practical and scholarly expertise in the field. This book will become an essential handbook and a classic study for future generations of scholars.

In her critical biography, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris (Thames & Hudson), Alicia Foster deftly dismantles the various myths surrounding John and ensures that she regains her full artistic stature; the author asks important theoretical questions about the status of a self-portrait and the artist-model relationship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Enriched by over 240 reproductions of paintings and contemporary photographs and through many excerpts of letters, the reader is immersed in the artist’s deeply personal aesthetic world.

Richly researched and beautifully written, Laura Freeman charts the story of one of the most fascinating figures of mid-century British art, the curator, patron and museum maker, Jim Ede. Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists (Penguin, Jonathan Cape), brings Ede’s Cambridge house to life, offering fresh insights into its familiar collection of paintings, sculptures and pebbles. Based on meticulous research, Freeman populates her narrative with a fascinating cast of characters from Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to T.E. Lawrence.

Highlighting an area which is gaining momentum and interest for scholars as well as collectors, Alun Graves’s Studio Ceramics (Thames & Hudson / V&A) presents the state of the national collection of Studio Ceramics and will have international impact. The exemplary writing, photography and design make this the unmissable reference work on the subject.

The complex world of post-colonial scholarship is nimbly traversed for a modern audience by Tom Young in Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c.1813–58 (Paul Mellon Centre). This revelatory book explores how the visual culture of members of the East India Company prompted significant structural change. Fresh material is explored from a compelling new angle, charting the ways in which new artistic forms and practices presaged shifts in the governance of the Company and its relationship with the people it governed. This is a dazzling and erudite intervention that will define the discipline for future generations.

The Berger Prize is the most prestigious award in art history, offering the largest cash prize in the field: £5,000 is awarded to the winner and £500 to each of the shortlisted authors. Named in honour of the late William B. Berger, whose collection of British art is on display at the Denver Art Museum in his native Colorado, the award was founded in 2001 by the Berger Collection Educational Trust (BCET) and The British Art Journal. This year, for the first time, The Walpole Society, which promotes the study of Britain’s art history, has partnered with the BCET to deliver the prize, which celebrates brilliant writing and scholarship about the arts and architecture of the United Kingdom.