# Pulitzer Prize for History

Pulitzer Prize :
Joseph Pulitzer
Columbia University
Pulitzers by year
Winners
Multi-award winners
Special Citations and Awards :
Journalism :
Letters
Drama
Music :
Biography
Memoir or Autobiography
History
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Fiction
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vte :
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. 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.

## 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.

### 1910s–1970s

Pulitzer Prize for History winners, 1917–1979 :
| Year | Author | Title |
| 1917 | Jean Jules Jusserand | With Americans of Past and Present Days |
| 1918 | James Ford Rhodes | A History of the Civil War, 1861-1865 |
| 1919 | No award presented | No award presented |
| 1920 | Justin H. Smith | The War with Mexico |
| 1921 | William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick | The Victory at Sea |
| 1922 | James Truslow Adams | The Founding of New England |
| 1923 | Charles Warren | The Supreme Court in United States History |
| 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 |
| 1930 | Claude H. Van Tyne | The War of Independence |
| 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 |
| 1937 | Van Wyck Brooks | The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 |
| 1938 | Paul Herman Buck | The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900 |
| 1939 | Frank Luther Mott | A History of American Magazines |
| 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 |
| 1943 | Esther Forbes | Paul Revere and the World He Lived In |
| 1944 | Merle Curti | The Growth of American Thought |
| 1945 | Stephen Bonsal | Unfinished Business |
| 1946 | Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. | The Age of Jackson |
| 1947 | James Phinney Baxter III | Scientists Against Time |
| 1948 | Bernard DeVoto | Across the Wide Missouri |
| 1949 | Roy Franklin Nichols | The Disruption of American Democracy |
| 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 |
| 1961 | Herbert Feis | Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 1967 | William H. Goetzmann | Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West |
| 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 |
| 1974 | Daniel J. Boorstin | The Americans: The Democratic Experience |
| 1975 | Dumas Malone | Jefferson and His Time |
| 1976 | Paul Horgan | Lamy of Santa Fe |
| 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 |
| 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 :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 1980 | Leon F. Litwack | Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery | Winner |
| 1980 | Gary B. Nash | The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution | Finalist |
| 1980 | 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 |
| 1981 | David M. Kennedy | Over Here: The First World War and American Society | Finalist |
| 1981 | 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 |
| 1982 | George M. Fredrickson | White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American & South African History | Finalist |
| 1982 | Akira Iriye | Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 | Finalist |
| 1983 | Rhys L. Isaac | The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 | Winner |
| 1983 | Robert Middlekauff | The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 | Finalist |
| 1983 | Bertram Wyatt-Brown | Southern Honor: Ethics & Behavior in the Old South | Finalist |
| 1984 | No Award presented | No Award presented | No Award presented |
| 1985 | Thomas K. McCraw | Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn | Winner |
| 1985 | Francis Paul Prucha | The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians | Finalist |
| 1985 | 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 |
| 1986 | Jacqueline Jones | Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present | Finalist |
| 1986 | Forrest McDonald | Novus Ordo Seclorum: the Intellectual Origins of the Constitution | Finalist |
| 1986 | 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 |
| 1987 | David Eisenhower | Eisenhower: At War, 1943–1945 | Finalist |
| 1987 | 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 |
| 1988 | David Montgomery | The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 | Finalist |
| 1988 | 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 |
| 1989 | James M. McPherson | Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era | Winner |
| 1989 | Eric Foner | Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution – 1863–1877 | Finalist |
| 1989 | Neil Sheehan | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam | Finalist |

### 1990s

Pulitzer Prize for History winners, 1990-1999 :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 1990 | Stanley Karnow | In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines | Winner |
| 1990 | Hugh Honour | The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV: From the American Revolution to World War I | Finalist |
| 1990 | Thomas P. Hughes | American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870–1970 | Finalist |
| 1991 | Laurel Thatcher Ulrich | A Midwife's Tale | Winner |
| 1991 | Lizabeth Cohen | Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 | Finalist |
| 1991 | Hugh Davis Graham | The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy | Finalist |
| 1991 | 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 |
| 1992 | William Cronon | Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West | Finalist |
| 1992 | Theodore Draper | A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs | Finalist |
| 1992 | John Frederick Martin | Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century | Finalist |
| 1992 | 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 |
| 1993 | Edward L. Ayers | The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction | Finalist |
| 1993 | Garry Wills | Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America | Finalist |
| 1994 | No award given | No award given | No award given |
| 1994 | Lawrence M. Friedman | Crime and Punishment in American History | Finalist |
| 1994 | Gerald Posner | Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK | Finalist |
| 1994 | 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 |
| 1995 | James Goodman | Stories of Scottsboro | Finalist |
| 1995 | 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 |
| 1996 | Lance Banning | The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic | Finalist |
| 1996 | 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 |
| 1997 | Stephen Nissenbaum | The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday | Finalist |
| 1997 | 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 |
| 1998 | J. Anthony Lukas | Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America | Finalist |
| 1998 | 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 |
| 1999 | William E. Burrows | This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age | Finalist |
| 1999 | Paula Mitchell Marks | In a Barren Land: American Indian Dispossession and Survival | Finalist |

### 2000s

Pulitzer Prize for History winners, 2000-2009 :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 2000 | David M. Kennedy | Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War | Winner |
| 2000 | James H. Merrell | Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier | Finalist |
| 2000 | Kevin Phillips | The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America | Finalist |
| 2001 | Joseph J. Ellis | Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation | Winner |
| 2001 | Frances FitzGerald | Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War | Finalist |
| 2001 | 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 |
| 2002 | J. William Harris | Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and the Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation | Finalist |
| 2002 | 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 |
| 2003 | Philip Dray | At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America | Finalist |
| 2003 | 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 |
| 2004 | David Maraniss | They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 | Finalist |
| 2004 | Daniel Okrent | Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center | Finalist |
| 2005 | David Hackett Fischer | Washington's Crossing | Winner |
| 2005 | Kevin Boyle | Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age | Finalist |
| 2005 | 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 |
| 2006 | Jill Lepore | New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan | Finalist |
| 2006 | 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 |
| 2007 | James T. Campbell | Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 | Finalist |
| 2007 | 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 |
| 2008 | Robert Dallek | Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power | Finalist |
| 2008 | David Halberstam | The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War | Finalist |
| 2009 | Annette Gordon-Reed | The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family | Winner |
| 2009 | Drew Gilpin Faust | This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | Finalist |
| 2009 | 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 :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 2010 | Liaquat Ahamed | Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World | Winner |
| 2010 | Greg Grandin | Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City | Finalist |
| 2010 | 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 |
| 2011 | Stephanie McCurry | Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South | Finalist |
| 2011 | Michael J. Rawson | Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston | Finalist |
| 2012 | Manning Marable | Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention | Winner |
| 2012 | Anne F. Hyde | Empires, Nations & Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 | Finalist |
| 2012 | Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan | The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden | Finalist |
| 2012 | 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 |
| 2013 | Bernard Bailyn | The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 | Finalist |
| 2013 | 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 |
| 2014 | Jacqueline Jones | A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America | Finalist |
| 2014 | 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 |
| 2015 | Sven Beckert | Empire of Cotton: A Global History | Finalist |
| 2015 | 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 |
| 2016 | Annie Jacobsen | The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency | Finalist |
| 2016 | Brian Matthew Jordan | Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War | Finalist |
| 2016 | 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 |
| 2017 | Larrie D. Ferreiro | Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It | Finalist |
| 2017 | 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 |
| 2018 | Kim Phillips-Fein | Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics | Finalist |
| 2018 | Steven J. Ross | Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots against Hollywood and America | Finalist |
| 2019 | David W. Blight | Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom | Winner |
| 2019 | W. Fitzhugh Brundage | Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition | Finalist |
| 2019 | Victoria Johnson | American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic | Finalist |

### 2020s

Pulitzer Prize for History winners, 2020-2024 :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 2020 | W. Caleb McDaniel | Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America | Winner |
| 2020 | Greg Grandin | The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America | Finalist |
| 2020 | Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor | Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership | Finalist |
| 2021 | Marcia Chatelain | Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America | Winner |
| 2021 | Eric Cervini | The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America | Finalist |
| 2021 | Megan Kate Nelson | The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West | Finalist |
| 2022 | Nicole Eustace | Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America | Winner |
| 2022 | Ada Ferrer | Cuba: An American History | Winner |
| 2022 | Kate Masur | Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction | Finalist |
| 2023 | Jefferson Cowie | Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power | Winner |
| 2023 | Garrett M. Graff | Watergate: A New History | Finalist |
| 2023 | Michael John Witgen | Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America | Finalist |
| 2024 | Jacqueline Jones | No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era | Winner |
| 2024 | Elliott West | Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion | Finalist |
| 2024 | Michael Willrich | American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century | 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
* 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.