Three Americans are in the running for the inaugural Cundill International Prize in History, billed as "the world's largest non-fiction historical prize," Montreal's McGill University, the award's administrator, announced yesterday.
Nominated for the $75,000 (U.S.) top prize are Harold J. Cook for Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age; Stuart B. Schwartz for All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World; and Peter Fritzche for Life and Death in the Third Reich. The first two are published by Yale University Press, the last by Harvard University Press.
The winner is to be named on Nov. 25, with each runner-up receiving $10,000. The short list was culled from a long list of 15 titles by a six-member jury. The sole Canadian nominees on the long list were York University humanities and religion professor Barrie Wilson for How Jesus Became a Christian (Random House of Canada) and University of Alberta historian Sarah Carter for The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (U of A Press/Athabasca University).
The award was started by London-based financier Peter Cundill, a Montreal native who graduated from McGill's commerce program in 1960.