Today, at the Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal, the jurors awarded the 2026 Cundill History Prize, which celebrates “outstanding history writing,” to John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law by Beth Lew-Williams. These laws were part of a larger racial regime, one of whose consequences was to contain and suppress the lives of Chinese migrants, reducing them to anonymous stereotypes—the “John Doe Chinaman” of the title. Using a supple combination of data algorithms to process legal and bureaucratic records and trenchant storytelling, Lew-Williams documents the ghosting of these lives in the historical record, retrieving Chinese voices that show us some of what we are missing.
This is a dazzlingly innovative and hard-hitting work. Lew-Williams will be awarded $75,000; finalists Jonathan Cheng and Alexander Lee, will each take home $10,000.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
