2009 Mark Lynton History Prize Winner

Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

"In Vermeer's Hat, Tim Brook plays a dazzling game of extrapolation, looking closely at the domestic accoutrements in half a dozen paintings and demonstrating that Vermeer's ostensible subject-the provincial Dutch city of Delft-was actually a window through which we can today perceive the rise of international trade during the 17th century and the dawn of global commerce. Whether the broad brimmed hat of the title, which was made of pelts from Canadian beaver, or a porcelain bowl from China, or a coin of silver mined in Peru, Brook latches on to particular physical details in the domestic life of Vermeer's subjects and traces the threads of maritime commerce that brought them to Delft, illuminating in the process a vast and intricate economic web and demonstrating that centuries before the concept of 'globalization,' merchants and traders had knit the distant corners of the planet together. From the spread of firearms and tobacco to the global cooling that drove herring to migrate south and in so doing enabled the rise of the Dutch East India Company, Brook employs the delicately rendered details in each painting as prisms through which to show us the wider world. In masterfully erudite, lucid prose, he follows each commodity to its point of origin and argues, persuasively, that in the global world of the seventeenth century there was 'no place that was not implied by every other place.' Vermeer's Hat is a bold, original, and compulsively readable work of history, a true virtuoso performance."

Finalists:
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
Joe Jackson, The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire
William I. Hitchcock, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe

2009 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award Winner

Yellow Dirt: The Betrayal of the Navajos

In Yellow Dirt: The Betrayal of the Navajos, Judy Pasternak promises to tell a narrative history of the most dramatic and profound sort. Nearly sixty years ago, mining companies descended on the Navajo nation to dig up uranium for the United States government, which was busily building up a stockpile of nuclear weapons, and in the process they turned the beautiful Navajo lands into a toxic environment, where even today there are areas with astonishingly high levels of radiation. Through original research and numerous interviews, she will document one of the darker chapters in 20th century American history. At the same time, her book will tell a moving story of the Navajo people—their love of the land, their spiritual perceptions of the world, and their own complicated involvement in the mining of the “yellow dirt.” Readers will come to intimately know four generations of a proud Navajo family, whose patriarch, Adika’i, foresaw the harm that would come to the Navajo people from this enterprise. Judy Pasternak’s reporting is impeccable, her writing is vivid, and her subject is a most worthy one. As J. Anthony Lukas proved in Common Ground, this is a recipe for creating a memorable and important work of non-fiction.”