A Thousand Years of Resilience: Kathleen DuVal Captures the Pulitzer for "Native Nations: A Millennium in North America"

The literary world celebrated a defining work of historical scholarship with the announcement on May 5th that Kathleen DuVal had won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for her exhaustive book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024). This prestigious recognition arrives as a capstone to an already remarkable reception, joining other top-tier honors the book has garnered, including the Bancroft Prize, the Cundill History Prize, and the Mark Lynton History Prize.

DuVal, a distinguished professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, immediately sensed the positive reception and perceived importance of the work. She shared that the initial reviews were not only positive but consistently focused on "the breadth of the book and the importance of the book," a reaction which "felt really good" because it aligned perfectly with her ambition for the project. DuVal openly stated that this book contained "the biggest claims of any book I've ever written." Indeed, the volume was lauded by The Wall Street Journal as "an essential American history," and was praised by Publishers Weekly for being "prodigiously researched." Native Nations meticulously traces a thousand years of Native history, illustrating how tribal nations continuously adapted to immense challenges, including the cataclysmic arrival of Europeans, as well as the ongoing struggles posed by climate change and various conflicts.

The historian credited her ability to paint such an expansive portrait to her previous scholarly works and her extensive teaching experience, noting that she "couldn't have written this one first." Her debut, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), originated as her doctoral dissertation at UC Davis and examined the complex dynamics of colonization in the Arkansas region. She then expanded her focus for Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (Random House, 2016), which examined the American Revolution through the eyes of colonial society’s outsiders, including Native Americans, enslaved people, and women.

In preparing Native Nations, DuVal undertook a rigorous research process, delving into both traditional archival primary documents and contemporary oral histories. She also prioritized consulting the ways that particular nations choose to tell their own stories, examining their specific books, cultural centers, and museums. A central message she absorbed during her research was the unwavering refrain from Native people: “we're still here. The most important thing you can say in this book is that Native nations are still around.” DuVal stated that she "really took that to heart."

Furthermore, the author was determined to place the well-known tragedies of Native histories into a longer, more impactful perspective. By doing so, she argues, it makes the fact that Native nations survived "even more amazing." She insisted, "I don't try at all to minimize the tragedy, but I try to show the triumph over that tragedy," a narrative choice which she believes transforms the subject into an even more heroic story than focusing solely on the devastation.

The Pulitzer Prizes honor outstanding achievement across journalism, arts, and letters. In the same history category, Seth Rockman, a Ph.D. graduate from 1999 and currently an associate professor of history at Brown University, was named a finalist for his book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (University of Chicago, 2024). Looking ahead, DuVal plans to take a sabbatical from teaching next year to focus on her next book at the National Humanities Center. This future project is intentionally timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, for which she is writing a book about Yorktown. This work will specifically look at how different people experienced the war itself in a place that saw "a huge amount of warfare right around people."