Longman-History Today Book Award 2012: The Shortlist

The shortlist for the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award has been decided.

The shortlist reflects both the quality and the breadth of history books published this year. It was a challenge to sift through and judge so many excellent examples of the historian’s craft. But as readers of these wonderful and very different books will realise, all talk of a crisis in history appears to be wildly exaggerated. The discipline is in rude health.

The winner of the £2,000 prize, awarded to the best first or second history book published in the preceding 12 months, will be announced at a ceremony at the Museum of the Order of St John, London on January 11th, 2012.

Here are the shortlisted titles:

Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (Granta)

Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press)

James Mark, The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (Yale University Press)

Ciarán ó Murchadha, The Great Famine: Ireland’s Agony 1845-1852 (Continuum)

Thomas Penn, Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England (Allen Lane)

Naomi Tadmor, The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society and Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press)

The judges are: Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter; Taylor Downing, historian and film-maker; Juliet Gardiner, Reviews Editor of History Today and author of The Blitz: The British Under Attack (Harper Press, 2010); Paul Lay, Editor of History Today; and Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London.