Toussaint Louverture's revolutionary leadership in Haiti; Ravenna's place as a hub of culture and a meeting point of East and West; how motherhood and work have changed from Victorian Manchester factories to the modern boardroom; a 3,000 year history of attacks on libraries and book burnings; battles in the Atlantic from the Vikings to conflicts over slavery in the Caribbean and on the North American coast; recovering the voices of children who experienced the Holocaust: Rana Mitter looks at how the six authors shortlisted for the UK's most prestigious history prize have tackled these topics.

The books shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2021 are:

Survivors: Children’s Lives after the Holocaust by Rebecca Clifford
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh
Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe by Judith Herrin
Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood by Helen McCarthy
Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovenden
Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution by Geoffrey Plank

The winner will be announced on Wednesday 9 June 2021 in a virtual ceremony. The winner will be awarded £40,000 and each of the shortlisted authors receives £4,000.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

In the Free Thinking archives you can find interviews with the authors shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in previous years and a host of discussions about history looking at topics including Napoleon, John Henry Newman, Adnam Menderes and Turkish history, Northern Ireland, what we can learn from the upheavals of industrial revolution and empires ending, war in fact and fiction, Churchill, family ties and reshaping history with guests including Margaret McMillan, Tom Holland, Jared Diamond, Priya Atwal, Camilla Townsend, Ruth Scurr, Roy Foster and David Reynolds amongst others.