Pulitzer Prize for History

The Pulitzer Prize for History, administered by Columbia University, is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It has been presented since 1917 for a distinguished book about the history of the United States. Thus it is one of the original Pulitzers, for the program was inaugurated in 1917 with seven prizes, four of which were awarded that year.^[1] The Pulitzer Prize program has also recognized some historical work with its Biography prize, from 1917, and its General Nonfiction prize, from 1962.

Finalists have been announced since 1980, ordinarily two others beside the winner.^[2]

Winners

In its first 97 years to 2013, the History Pulitzer was awarded 95 times. Two prizes were given in 1989; none in 1919, 1984, and 1994.^[2]

1910s–1970s

Pulitzer Prize for History winners, 1917–1979^[3]

Year	Author	Title	Ref.
1917	Jean Jules Jusserand	With Americans of Past and Present Days
1918	James Ford Rhodes	A History of the Civil War, 1861-1865	[4]
1919	No award presented
1920	Justin H. Smith	The War with Mexico	[4]
1921	William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick	The Victory at Sea	[4]
1922	James Truslow Adams	The Founding of New England	[5]
1923	Charles Warren	The Supreme Court in United States History	[4]
1924	Charles Howard McIlwain	The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation
1925	Frederic L. Paxson	History of the American Frontier
1926	Edward Channing	A History of the United States, Vol. VI: The War for Southern Independence (1849–1865)
1927	Samuel Flagg Bemis	Pinckney's Treaty
1928	Vernon Louis Parrington	Main Currents in American Thought
1929	Fred Albert Shannon	The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861–1865	[6]
1930	Claude H. Van Tyne†	The War of Independence	[4]
1931	Bernadotte E. Schmitt	The Coming of the War, 1914
1932	John J. Pershing	My Experiences in the World War
1933	Frederick J. Turner†	The Significance of Sections in American History
1934	Herbert Agar	The People's Choice
1935	Charles McLean Andrews	The Colonial Period of American History
1936	Andrew C. McLaughlin	A Constitutional History of the United States	[7]
1937	Van Wyck Brooks	The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865
1938	Paul Herman Buck	The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900	[4]
1939	Frank Luther Mott	A History of American Magazines	[4]
1940	Carl Sandburg	Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
1941	Marcus Lee Hansen†	The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860
1942	Margaret Leech	Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865	[4]
1943	Esther Forbes	Paul Revere and the World He Lived In	[4]
1944	Merle Curti	The Growth of American Thought
1945	Stephen Bonsal	Unfinished Business
1946	Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.	The Age of Jackson	[8]
1947	James Phinney Baxter III	Scientists Against Time	[4]
1948	Bernard DeVoto	Across the Wide Missouri
1949	Roy Franklin Nichols	The Disruption of American Democracy	[4]
1950	Oliver W. Larkin	Art and Life in America
1951	R. Carlyle Buley	The Old Northwest, Pioneer Period 1815–1840
1952	Oscar Handlin	The Uprooted
1953	George Dangerfield	The Era of Good Feelings
1954	Bruce Catton	A Stillness at Appomattox
1955	Paul Horgan	Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History
1956	Richard Hofstadter	The Age of Reform
1957	George F. Kennan	Russia Leaves the War: Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920
1958	Bray Hammond	Banks and Politics in America
1959	Leonard D. White† and Jean Schneider	The Republican Era: 1869–1901
1960	Margaret Leech	In the Days of McKinley	[4]
1961	Herbert Feis	Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference	[4]
1962	Lawrence H. Gipson	The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766
1963	Constance McLaughlin Green	Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878
1964	Sumner Chilton Powell	Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town	[4]
1965	Irwin Unger	The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879
1966	Perry Miller†	The Life of the Mind in America	[4]
1967	William H. Goetzmann	Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West	[4]
1968	Bernard Bailyn	The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
1969	Leonard W. Levy	Origins of the Fifth Amendment: The Right Against Self-Incrimination
1970	Dean Acheson	Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department
1971	James MacGregor Burns	Roosevelt: The Soldier Of Freedom
1972	Carl N. Degler	Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States
1973	Michael Kammen	People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization	[9]
1974	Daniel J. Boorstin	The Americans: The Democratic Experience	[10]
1975	Dumas Malone	Jefferson and His Time
1976	Paul Horgan	Lamy of Santa Fe	[11]
1977	David M. Potter† (Completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher)	The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861
1978	Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.	The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business	[12]
1979	Don E. Fehrenbacher	The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics

1980s

Entries from this point on include the finalists listed after the winner for each year.

Pulitzer Prize for History winners, 1980-1989^[3]

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1980	Leon F. Litwack	Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery	Winner
	Gary B. Nash	The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution	Finalist
	John B. Unruh	The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants on the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60	Finalist
1981	Lawrence A. Cremin	American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876	Winner	[13]
	David M. Kennedy	Over Here: The First World War and American Society	Finalist
	Lyle Koehler	A Search for Power: The 'Weaker Sex' in Seventeenth Century New England	Finalist
1982	C. Vann Woodward	Mary Chesnut's Civil War	Winner
	George M. Fredrickson	White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American & South African History	Finalist
	Akira Iriye	Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941–1945	Finalist
1983	Rhys L. Isaac	The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790	Winner
	Robert Middlekauff	The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789	Finalist
	Bertram Wyatt-Brown	Southern Honor: Ethics & Behavior in the Old South	Finalist
1984	No Award presented
1985	Thomas K. McCraw	Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn	Winner
	Francis Paul Prucha	The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians	Finalist
	Joel Williamson	The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation	Finalist
1986	Walter A. McDougall	...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age	Winner
	Jacqueline Jones	Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present	Finalist
	Forrest McDonald	Novus Ordo Seclorum: the Intellectual Origins of the Constitution	Finalist
	Kerby A. Miller	Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America	Finalist
1987	Bernard Bailyn	Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution	Winner
	David Eisenhower	Eisenhower: At War, 1943–1945	Finalist
	David Garrow	Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference	Finalist
1988	Robert V. Bruce	The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876	Winner
	David Montgomery	The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925	Finalist
	Charles E. Rosenberg	The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America's Hospital System	Finalist
1989	Taylor Branch	Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963	Winner
	James M. McPherson	Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era	Winner
	Eric Foner	Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution – 1863–1877	Finalist
	Neil Sheehan	A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam	Finalist

1990s

Pulitzer Prize for History winners, 1990-1999^[3]

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1990	Stanley Karnow	In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines	Winner
	Hugh Honour	The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV: From the American Revolution to World War I	Finalist
	Thomas P. Hughes	American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870–1970	Finalist
1991	Laurel Thatcher Ulrich	A Midwife's Tale	Winner
	Lizabeth Cohen	Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939	Finalist
	Hugh Davis Graham	The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy	Finalist
	Kenneth M. Stampp	America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink	Finalist
1992	Mark E. Neely, Jr.	The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties	Winner
	William Cronon	Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West	Finalist
	Theodore Draper	A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs	Finalist
	John Frederick Martin	Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century	Finalist
	Richard White	The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815	Finalist
1993	Gordon S. Wood	The Radicalism of the American Revolution	Winner
	Edward L. Ayers	The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction	Finalist
	Garry Wills	Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America	Finalist
1994	No award given
	Lawrence M. Friedman	Crime and Punishment in American History	Finalist
	Gerald Posner	Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK	Finalist
	Joel Williamson	William Faulkner and Southern History	Finalist
1995	Doris Kearns Goodwin	No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II	Winner
	James Goodman	Stories of Scottsboro	Finalist
	Merrill D. Peterson	Lincoln in American Memory	Finalist
1996	Alan Taylor	William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic	Winner
	Lance Banning	The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic	Finalist
	Richard Rhodes	Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb	Finalist
1997	Jack N. Rakove	Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution	Winner
	Stephen Nissenbaum	The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday	Finalist
	Mary Beth Norton	Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society	Finalist
1998	Edward J. Larson	Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion	Winner	[14]
	J. Anthony Lukas	Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America	Finalist
	Rogers Smith	Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History	Finalist
1999	Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace	Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898	Winner	[15]
	William E. Burrows	This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age	Finalist
	Paula Mitchell Marks	In a Barren Land: American Indian Dispossession and Survival	Finalist

2000s

Pulitzer Prize for History winners, 2000-2009^[3]

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
2000	David M. Kennedy	Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War	Winner
	James H. Merrell	Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier	Finalist
	Kevin Phillips	The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America	Finalist
2001	Joseph J. Ellis	Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation	Winner	[16]
	Frances FitzGerald	Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War	Finalist
	Alexander Keyssar	The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States	Finalist
2002	Louis Menand	The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America	Winner
	J. William Harris	Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and the Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation	Finalist
	Daniel K. Richter	Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America	Finalist
2003	Rick Atkinson	An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943	Winner
	Philip Dray	At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America	Finalist
	Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz	Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth Century America	Finalist
2004	Steven Hahn	A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration	Winner
	David Maraniss	They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967	Finalist
	Daniel Okrent	Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center	Finalist
2005	David Hackett Fischer	Washington's Crossing	Winner
	Kevin Boyle	Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age	Finalist
	Michael O'Brien	Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860, volumes 1 & 2	Finalist
2006	David Oshinsky	Polio: An American Story	Winner
	Jill Lepore	New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan	Finalist
	Sean Wilentz	The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln	Finalist
2007	Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff	The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation	Winner
	James T. Campbell	Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005	Finalist
	Nathaniel Philbrick	Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War	Finalist
2008	Daniel Walker Howe	What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848	Winner
	Robert Dallek	Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power	Finalist
	David Halberstam	The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War	Finalist
2009	Annette Gordon-Reed	The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family	Winner	[17][18]
	Drew Gilpin Faust	This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War	Finalist
	G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot	The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s	Finalist

2010s

Pulitzer Prize for History winners, 2010-2019^[3]

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
2010	Liaquat Ahamed	Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World	Winner	[19]
	Greg Grandin	Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City	Finalist
	Gordon S. Wood	Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815	Finalist
2011	Eric Foner	The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery	Winner	[20]
	Stephanie McCurry	Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South	Finalist	[21]
	Michael J. Rawson	Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston	Finalist	[22]
2012	Manning Marable†	Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention	Winner	[23][24]
	Anne F. Hyde	Empires, Nations & Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860	Finalist
	Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan	The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden	Finalist
	Richard White	Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America	Finalist
2013	Fredrik Logevall	Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam	Winner	[25]
	Bernard Bailyn	The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675	Finalist
	John Fabian Witt	Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History	Finalist
2014	Alan Taylor	The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832	Winner	[26][27]
	Jacqueline Jones	A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America	Finalist
	Eric Schlosser	Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety	Finalist
2015	Elizabeth A. Fenn	Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People	Winner	[28]
	Sven Beckert	Empire of Cotton: A Global History	Finalist
	Nick Bunker	An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America	Finalist
2016	T. J. Stiles	Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America	Winner	[29]
	Annie Jacobsen	The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency	Finalist
	Brian Matthew Jordan	Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War	Finalist
	James M. Scott	Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor	Finalist
2017	Heather Ann Thompson	Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy	Winner	[30][31]
	Larrie D. Ferreiro	Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It	Finalist
	Wendy Warren	New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America	Finalist
2018	Jack E. Davis	The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea	Winner	[32][33]
	Kim Phillips-Fein	Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics	Finalist	[32]
	Steven J. Ross	Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots against Hollywood and America	Finalist	[32]
2019	David W. Blight	Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom	Winner	[34][35]
	W. Fitzhugh Brundage	Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition	Finalist	[34]
	Victoria Johnson	American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic	Finalist	[34]

2020s

Pulitzer Prize for History winners, 2020-2024^[3]

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
2020	W. Caleb McDaniel	Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America	Winner	[36][37][38]
	Greg Grandin	The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America	Finalist	[36]
	Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor	Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership	Finalist	[36]
2021	Marcia Chatelain	Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America	Winner	[39][40][41]
	Eric Cervini	The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America	Finalist	[40]
	Megan Kate Nelson	The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West	Finalist	[40]
2022	Nicole Eustace	Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America	Winner	[42][43][44]
	Ada Ferrer	Cuba: An American History	Winner	[42][43][44]
	Kate Masur	Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction	Finalist	[42]
2023	Jefferson Cowie	Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power	Winner	[45][46]
	Garrett M. Graff	Watergate: A New History	Finalist	[45]
	Michael John Witgen	Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America	Finalist	[45]
2024	Jacqueline Jones	No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era	Winner	[47][48]
	Elliott West	Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion	Finalist	[47]
	Michael Willrich	American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century	Finalist	[47]
2025	Kathleen DuVal	Native Nations: A Millennium in North America	Winner
	Edda L. Fields-Black	Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War	Winner
	Seth Rockman	Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery	Finalist

Repeat winners

Five people have won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice.

• Margaret Leech, 1942 for Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 and 1960 for In the Days of McKinley
• Bernard Bailyn, 1968 for The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and 1987 for Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
• Paul Horgan, 1955 for Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History and 1976 for Lamy of Santa Fe
• Alan Taylor, 1996 for William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic and 2014 for The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832^[49]
• Don E. Fehrenbacher completed The Impending Crisis by David Potter, for which Potter posthumously won the 1977 prize, and won the 1979 prize himself for The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics.

See also

• List of history awards