All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (Random House) has won the $75,000 2022 Cundill History Prize, which is administered by McGill University and honors "the best history writing in English."
Organizers said, "In All That She Carried, Tiya Miles, traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives. It honours the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so."
Juror Martha S. Jones said, "Tiya Miles' All That She Carried is a history that reminds us about what makes us human. The book brings determined research and eloquent compassion to the story of an enslaved mother and her daughter just as they are doomed to be separated, and then discovers how one mother's love survived across time and space in the form of a simple cotton sack. We learn how the past still shapes our present and how we might use its hard won lessons to face the hardship of our own times. Miles deploys dogged research and elegant prose to reveal how the survivors of slavery's crime against humanity left a legacy that undergirds our present-day strivings for justice."
All That She Carried also has won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Memorial Prize.
The two runners up--Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer (Scribner) and Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok (Yale University Press)--each receive $10,000 awards.