# 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". The prize is one of three awards given as part of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and by the Columbia University School of Journalism.
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. 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 |
| 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 |
| 2007 | James T. Campbell | Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 | Winner |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 2011 | Patrick Wilcken | Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in His Laboratory | Finalist |
| 2012 | Sophia Rosenfeld | Common Sense: A Political History | Winner |
| 2012 | Michael Willrich | Pox: An American History | Finalist |
| 2012 | Craig Harline | Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America | Finalist |
| 2013 | Robert Caro | The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson | Winner |
| 2013 | David Nasaw | The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy | Finalist |
| 2014 | Jill Lepore | Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin | Winner |
| 2014 | Christopher Clark | The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 | Finalist |
| 2015 | Harold Holzer | Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion | Winner |
| 2015 | Andrew Roberts | Napoleon: A Life | Finalist |
| 2016 | Nikolaus Wachsmann | KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps | Winner |
| 2016 | Timothy Snyder | Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning | Finalist |
| 2016 | Sean McMeekin | The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923 | Shortlist |
| 2016 | 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 |
| 2016 | T. J. Stiles | Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Tyler Anbinder | City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York | Winner |
| 2017 | Adam Hochschild | Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 | Finalist |
| 2017 | Ethan Michaeli | The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Joan Quigley | Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital | Shortlist |
| 2017 | David Reid | The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire - Politics, Art and Bohemia | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Stephen Kotkin | Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 | Winner |
| 2018 | Caroline Fraser | Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder | Finalist |
| 2018 | Edward L. Ayers | The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Jonathan Eig | Ali: A Life | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Frances FitzGerald | The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Jeffrey C. Stewart | The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke | Winner |
| 2019 | Andrew Delbanco | The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War | Winner |
| 2019 | David W. Blight | Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom | Finalist |
| 2019 | Edith Sheffer | Asperger's Children | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Steven J. Zipperstein | Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Kerri K. Greenidge | Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter | Winner |
| 2020 | Daniel Immerwahr | How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States | Finalist |
| 2020 | Carrie Gibson | El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Pekka Hämäläinen | Lakota America | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Brendan Simms | Hitler | Shortlist |
| 2021 | William G. Thomas III | A Question Of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War | Winner |
| 2021 | Martha S. Jones | Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All | Finalist |
| 2021 | Walter Johnson | The Broken Heart of America | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Les Payne and Tamara Payne | The Dead Are Arising | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Géraldine Schwarz | Those Who Forget | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Jane Rogoyska | Surviving Katyń: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth | Winner |
| 2022 | Katie Booth | The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness | Finalist |
| 2022 | Noah Feldman | The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Amanda Frost | You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Tiya Miles | All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Deborah Cohen | Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War | Winner |
| 2023 | Kelly Lytle Hernández | Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire & Revolution in the Borderlands | Finalist |
| 2023 | Beverly Gage | G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Kerri K. Greenidge | The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Pekka Hämäläinen | Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Ned Blackhawk | The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History | Winner |
| 2024 | Gary J. Bass | Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia | Finalist |
| 2024 | Jonathan Eig | King: A Life | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Dylan C. Penningroth | Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Yepoka Yeebo | Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World | Shortlist |
| 2025 | Kathleen DuVal | Native Nations: A Millennium in North America | Shortlist |
| 2025 | Justene Hill Edwards | Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank | Shortlist |
| 2025 | Edda L. Fields-Black | COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War | Shortlist |
| 2025 | Seth Rockman | Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery | Shortlist |
| 2025 | Michael Waters | The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports | Shortlist |