NEW YORK—In May, the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History was awarded to Kathleen DuVal for her book Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, published by Random House in 2024.
DuVal, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is a historian specializing in early American and American Indian history; her work focuses on the interactions between Native Americans and people of European and African descent in early America.
The book, which Publisher's Weekly says was "prodigiously researched" traces a thousand years of Native history, showing how tribes have adapted to challenges, including the arrival of Europeans, but also climate change and conflict. Among DuVal's research souces, she studied primary documents and oral histories and examined how particular nations told their own stories in their own books, cultural centers, and museums
"One of the things that people said over and over is 'we're still here. The most important thing you can say in this book is that Native nations are still around.' So I really took that to heart," DuVal told UC Davis reporter Jocelyn Anderson, noting that she wanted to put the tragedies of Indigenous history in perspective. "By putting those tragedies in a longer perspective, it makes it kind of even more amazing that Native nations survived. I don't try at all to minimize the tragedy, but I try to show the triumph over that tragedy. And I think that makes it even more of a heroic story than if we just talk about the tragedy."
The Pulitzer Prize is not the first prestigious award the book has received. It has also been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Cundill History Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize. The Wall Street Journal lauded Native Nations as "an essential American history." Publishers Weekly said it was prodigiously researched.
DuVal's previous books are, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (Random House, 2016), which examined American Revolution through the eyes of the outsiders of colonial society, including Native Americans, slaves and women.
