Mark Lynton History Prize

The Mark Lynton History Prize is an annual $10,000 award given to a book "of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression".^[1] The prize is one of three awards given as part of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism^[2] and by the Columbia University School of Journalism.^[3]

The prize is named in honor of Mark Lynton, a refugee from Nazi Germany, Second World War officer, and automobile industry executive. In 1939 Lynton was a Jewish German-born student studying history at Cambridge when he and other German nationals were rounded up and interned in detention camps in England and Canada as enemy aliens, suspected of being Nazi sympathizers. When Lynton was released, he joined the British Army, became a tank commander, and was later promoted to Major in the occupying force, Army of the Rhine, where he helped interrogate high-ranking Nazi officers. Lynton memorialized his odyssey in his memoir, Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee's Memoir of World War II.^[4] The prize was established by his wife, Marion, children, Lili and Michael, and grandchildren, Lucinda, Eloise Lynton and Maisie Lynton, to honor Lynton who was an avid reader of history. The Lynton family has underwritten the Lukas Prize Project since its inception in 1998.

Recipients

Award winners and finalists

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1999	Adam Hochschild	King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa	Winner
2000	John W. Dower	Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II	Winner
2001	Fred Anderson	Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766	Winner
2002	Mark Roseman	A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany	Winner
2003	Robert W. Harms	The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of Slave Trade	Winner
2004	Rebecca Solnit	River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West	Winner
2005	Richard Steven Street	Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769–1913	Winner
2006	Megan Marshall	The Peabody Sisters: Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism	Winner	[5]
2007	James T. Campbell	Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005	Winner	[6]
2008	Peter Silver	Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America	Winner
2009	Timothy Brook	Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World	Winner	[7]
2010	James Davidson	The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World	Winner
2011	Isabel Wilkerson	The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration	Winner	[8]
	Patrick Wilcken	Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in His Laboratory	Finalist	[8]
2012	Sophia Rosenfeld	Common Sense: A Political History	Winner	[9]
	Michael Willrich	Pox: An American History	Finalist	[10]
	Craig Harline	Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America	Finalist	[10]
2013	Robert Caro	The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson	Winner	[11]
	David Nasaw	The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy	Finalist	[11]
2014	Jill Lepore	Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin	Winner	[12]
	Christopher Clark	The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914	Finalist	[12]
2015	Harold Holzer	Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion	Winner	[13]
	Andrew Roberts	Napoleon: A Life	Finalist	[13]
2016	Nikolaus Wachsmann	KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps	Winner	[14]
	Timothy Snyder	Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning	Finalist	[14]
	Sean McMeekin	The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923	Shortlist	[15]
	Jan Jarboe Russell	The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prison Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II	Shortlist	[15]
	T. J. Stiles	Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America	Shortlist	[15]
2017	Tyler Anbinder	City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York	Winner	[16][17]
	Adam Hochschild	Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939	Finalist	[16][17]
	Ethan Michaeli	The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America	Shortlist	[18]
	Joan Quigley	Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital	Shortlist	[18]
	David Reid	The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire - Politics, Art and Bohemia	Shortlist	[18]
2018	Stephen Kotkin	Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941	Winner	[19]
	Caroline Fraser	Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder	Finalist	[19]
	Edward L. Ayers	The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America	Shortlist	[20]
	Jonathan Eig	Ali: A Life	Shortlist	[20]
	Frances FitzGerald	The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America	Shortlist	[20]
2019	Jeffrey C. Stewart	The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke	Winner	[21]
	Andrew Delbanco	The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War	Winner	[21]
	David W. Blight	Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom	Finalist	[21]
	Edith Sheffer	Asperger's Children	Shortlist	[22]
	Steven J. Zipperstein	Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History	Shortlist	[22]
2020	Kerri K. Greenidge	Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter	Winner	[23][24]
	Daniel Immerwahr	How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States	Finalist	[23][24]
	Carrie Gibson	El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America	Shortlist	[25][26]
	Pekka Hämäläinen	Lakota America	Shortlist	[25][26]
	Brendan Simms	Hitler	Shortlist	[25][26]
2021	William G. Thomas III	A Question Of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War	Winner	[27][28]
	Martha S. Jones	Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All	Finalist	[27][28]
	Walter Johnson	The Broken Heart of America	Shortlist	[29][30]
	Les Payne and Tamara Payne	The Dead Are Arising	Shortlist	[29][30]
	Géraldine Schwarz	Those Who Forget	Shortlist	[29][30]
2022	Jane Rogoyska	Surviving Katyń: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth	Winner	[31][32]
	Katie Booth	The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness	Finalist	[31][32]
	Noah Feldman	The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America	Shortlist	[33][34]
	Amanda Frost	You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers	Shortlist	[33][34]
	Tiya Miles	All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake	Shortlist	[33][34]
2023	Deborah Cohen	Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War	Winner	[35]
	Kelly Lytle Hernández	Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire & Revolution in the Borderlands	Finalist	[35]
	Beverly Gage	G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century	Shortlist	[36]
	Kerri K. Greenidge	The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family	Shortlist	[36]
	Pekka Hämäläinen	Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America	Shortlist	[36]
2024	Ned Blackhawk	The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History	Winner	[37]
	Gary J. Bass	Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia	Finalist	[37]
	Jonathan Eig	King: A Life	Shortlist	[38]
	Dylan C. Penningroth	Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights	Shortlist	[38]
	Yepoka Yeebo	Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World	Shortlist	[38]
2025	Kathleen DuVal	Native Nations: A Millennium in North America	Winner	[39]
	Edda L. Fields-Black	COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War	Finalist	[40]
	Seth Rockman	Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery	Finalist	[41]
	Justene Hill Edwards	Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank	Shortlist	[42]
	Michael Waters	The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports	Shortlist	[42]

See also

• List of history awards