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.
“In John Doe Chinaman, Beth Lew-Williams unravels the paradoxes of anti-Chinese racial laws in the American West from the 1850s to the 1920s, analysing the intentions of these laws, their effects, and how Chinese migrants responded to them,” said jury chair Emily Greenwood.
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.