The 2020 Shortlist for the RHS Whitfield Prize is announced today.
“This year’s Whitfield Prize shortlist is exceptionally strong. Every one of these titles displays British or Irish History at its best: innovative in approach, extensively researched, critically engaged in debates that inform thinking within and beyond the field, written with conviction yet with reflectiveness that will inspire colleagues, students, and readers beyond the academy”
– Dr Adam Budd, Whitfield Prize Committee Chair
The Prize offers £1,000 to the author of a work of British or Irish history.
The 2020 shortlist recognises the scholarly contribution and quality of six excellent history monographs published in 2019.
- Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain by Kieran Connell
- Inauguration and Liturgical Kingship in the Long Twelfth Century: Male and Female Accession Rituals in England, France and the Empire by Johanna Dale
- Ireland and the Great War: A Social and Political History by Niamh Gallagher
- The Veterans’ Tale. British Military Memoirs of the Second World War by Frances Houghton
- Sharing the Burden. The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order by Charlie Laderman
- Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985 by Rob Waters
The winner will be announced in July.
About the Prize
The Whitfield Prize was established by the Royal Historical Society in 1976 at the bequest of Professor Archibald Stenton Whitfield, who was a Fellow of the Society until his death in 1974. It is one of the Royal Historical Society’s two annual book awards.
To be eligible for the prize the book must:
- be its author’s first solely written history book;
- be on a subject within a field of British or Irish history;
- be an original and scholarly work of historical research by an author who received their doctoral degree from a British or Irish university;
- have been published in English during the calendar year 2019.
Find out more about the Prize, and its previous winners, on the RHS website.