WINNER OF THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZE, BANCROFT PRIZE, THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE, AND THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE!

Join author Dr. Kathleen DuVal, professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, as she discusses her 2025 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Native Nations. A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, spreading egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies across North America. For centuries afterward, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. Centering on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal shows how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant—and will continue far into the future.

Kathleen DuVal is a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Cundill History Prize. Her other books include Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent, and the U.S. history textbook Give Me Liberty! She has published in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, The Atlantic, Time magazine, and the New York Times, and she is a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal.