Pulitzer Prize for Letters - History

2009

Annette Gordon-Reed. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

Historian and legal scholar Gordon-Reed presents this epic work that tells the story of the Hemingses, an American slave family and their close blood ties to Thomas Jefferson.

2008

Daniel Walker Howe. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

This authoritative addition to Oxford's "History of the United States" series is a product of synthesis and astute analysis. Intellectual and cultural historian Howe (Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln) touches upon the rapidly expanding nation's economy, foreign relations, and social structures, taking into account race, gender, and ethnicity, and bringing special insights to his discussion of religious revivals and the evolution of moral consciousness, reform movements, and political institutions. The evocative title, which was the first message carried by Morse's telegraph, refers to the changes wrought by religious sensibilities as well as those wrought by technological breakthroughs.

2007

Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff. The Race Beat

This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South - and the brutality used to enforce it. It is the story of how the nation's press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

2006

David M. Oshinsky. Polio: An American Story

All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines-and beyond.

2005

David Hackett Fischer. Washington's Crossing

Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia. George Washington lost 90 percent of his army and was driven across the Delaware River. Panic and despair spread through the states.Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, Washington -- and many other Americans -- refused to let the Revolution die.

2004

Steven Hahn. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration

This is the epic story of how African Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people -- an embryonic black nation.

2003

Rick Atkinson. An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943

In this first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers without a grasp of the great drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943.

2002

Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

The Metaphysical Club begins with the Civil War and ends in 1919 with the Supreme Court decision in Abrams v. U.S., the basis for the modern law of free speech. It tells the story of the creation of ideas and values that changed the way Americans think and the way they live.

2001

Joseph J Ellis. Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation

Revisiting the old-fashioned idea that character matters, Founding Brothers informs our understanding of American politics -- then and now -- and gives us a new perspective on the unpredictable forces that shape history.

2000

David M. Kennedy. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. Freedom from Fear tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities.

1999

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

The first volume in a truly monumental two-volume history of New York City, this magisterial work begins with the earliest Indian tribes and ends with the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898.

1998

Edward J. Larson. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

Echoes of the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" over the teaching of evolution persist today, as Larson (history and law, U. of Georgia) illustrates in his narration--based on some new archival material--of this "trial of the century" and interpretation of its legacy.

1997

Jack N. Rakove. Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution

What did the U.S. Constitution originally mean, and who has comprehended its meaning best?

1996

Alan Taylor. William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic

Taylor reveals the interplay of frontier settlement and narrative-making in the early American Republic. He examines how Americans resolved their revolution through the creation of new property, new power, and new stories along their extensive frontier.

1995

Doris Kearns Goodwin. No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt - The Home front in World War II

Goodwin relates the unique story of how Franklin Roosevelt, surrounded by his small circle of intimates, led the nation to military victory abroad against seemingly insurmountable odds and, with Eleanor's essential help, forever changed the fabric of American society.

1994

No Award given.

1993

Gordon S. Wood. The Radicalism of the American Revolution

In a grand and immemsely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, a prize-winning historian depicts much more than a break with England. He gives readers a revolution that transformed an almost feudal society into a democratic one, whose emerging realities sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers.

1992

Mark E. Neely, Jr. The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties

If Lincoln was known as the Great Emancipator, he was also the only president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Indeed, Lincoln's record on the Constitution and individual rights has fueled a century of debate, and he has even been viewed as a dictator.

1991

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

On the basis of a diary, Ulrich gives the reader an intimate and densely imagined portrait of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard and her society--a portrait that sheds light on its medical practices, religious squabbles and sexual mores.

1990

Stanley Karnow. In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines

In a swiftly paced, brilliantly vivid narrative, Karnow focuses on the relationship that has existed between the two nations since the United States acquired the country from Spain in 1898, examing how we have sought to remake the Philippines 'in our image, ' an experiment marked from the outset by blundering, ignorance, and mutual misunderstanding.

1989

James M McPherson. Battle Cry Freedom: The Civil War Era

A history of the Civil War that brings to vivid life, the generals, the presidents, the soldiers, politicians, Abolitionists, Southern fire-eaters, Northern barn-burners, Copperheads, and Know-Nothings. An instant classic, this is the single volume on the tragic war and its background that every historian--amateur or trained--will want to have on the shelf to read again and again.

1988

Robert Bruce. The Launching of Modern American Science 1846-1876

Compared to European science during the period 1846 to 1876, American developments were relatively modest. Yet it was during this period that American science matured and that the infrastructures needed to sustain scientific progress were built.

1987

Bernard Bailyn. Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution

1986

Walter A. McDougall. The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age

This highly acclaimed study approaches the space race as a problem in comparative public policy. Drawing on exhaustive research, author and ORBIS editor Walter A. McDougall examines U.S., European, and Soviet space programs and their politics.

1985

Thomas K. McCraw. Prophets of Regulation

1984

No Award given.

1983

Rhys L. Isaac. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790

1982

C. Vann Woodward. Mary Chesnut's Civil War

1981

Lawrence A. Cremin. American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876

1980

Leon F. Litwack. Been in the Storm So Long

Based on hitherto unexamined sources: interviews with ex-slaves, diaries and accounts by former slaveholders, this book aims to show how, during the Civil War and after Emancipation, blacks and whites interacted in ways that dramatized not only their mutual dependency, but the ambiguities and tensions that had always been latent in "the peculiar institution."

1979

Don E. Fehrenbacher. The Dred Scott Case: It's Significance in American Law and Politics

A masterful examination of our nation's most famous example of judicial failure--the case referred to as "the most frequently overturned decision in history".

1978

Alfred D. Chandler Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business

1977

David M. Potter (a posthumous publication) manuscript finished Don E. Fehrenbacher. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861

1976

Paul Horgan. Larry of Santa Fe

1975

Dumas Malone. Jefferson and His Time, Vols. I-V

The definitive biography of Thomas Jefferson.

1974

Daniel J. Boorstein. The Americans: The Democratic Experience

Final volume in a trilogy; the first of which is the author's The Americans : the colonial experience; and the second of which is his The Americans : the national experience.

1973

Michael Kammen. People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American, Civilization

1972

Carl N. Degler. Neither Black Nor White

1971

James MacGregor Burns. Roosevelt, The Soldier of Freedom

The concluding volume of the first complete biography of FDR, 1940-1945.

1970

Dean Acheson. Present At The Creation: My Years In The State Department

1969

Leonard W. Levy. Origins of the Fifth Amendment

1968

Bernard Bailyn. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

In this book, Bailyn discusses the intense, nation-wide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution.

1967

William H. Goetzmann. Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West

1966

Perry Miller. Life of the Mind in America

1965

Irwin Unger. The Greenback Era

1964

Sumner Chilton Powell. Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town

The crucial split in the town of Sadbury illustrates the grave difficulties which the early leaders and inhabitants experienced in substituting a new social structure and a new spirit for the old 'hierarchy, hold days, etc.' which they undoubtedly hoped would be absent in the New England common-wealth. One might even see the story of early Sadbury as a type of local morality play, replete with Devil, Greed, and Ambition, opposed by both Faith and Prudence.

1963

Constance McLaughlin Green. Washington, Village and Capital, 1800-1878

1962

Lawrence H. Gibson. The Triumphant Empire, Thunder-Clouds in the West

1961

Herbert Feis. Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference

1960

Margaret Leech. In the Days of McKinley

1959

Leonard D. White with the assistance of Jean Schneider. The Republican Era: 1869-1901

1958

Bray Hammond. Banks and Politics in America

1957

George F. Kennan. Russia Leaves the War: Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920

1956

Richard Hofstadter. Age of Reform: from Bryan to F. D. R.

1955

Paul Horgan. Great River: the Rio Grande in North American History

This book is an epic history of four civilizations--Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American--that peopled the Southwest through ten centuries.

1954

Bruce Catton. A Stillness at Appomattox

1953

George Dangerfield. The Era of Good Feelings

1952

Oscar Handlin. The Uprooted

The Uprooted is a rare book, combining powerful feeling and long-time study to give us the shape and the feel of the immigrant experience rather than just the facts. It elucidates the hopes and the yearnings of the immigrants that propelled them out of their native environments to chance the hazards of the New World. It traces the profound imprint they made upon this world and how they, in turn, were changed by it.

1951

R. Carlyle Buley. The Old Northwest, Pioneer Period 1815-1840

1950

Oliver W. Larkin. Art and Life in America

1949

Roy Franklin Nichols. The Disruption of American Democracy

1948

Bernard DeVoto. Across the Wide Missouri

Across the Wide Missouri tells the compelling story of the climax and decline of the Rocky Mountain fur trade during the 1830s. More than a history, it portrays the mountain fur trade as a way of business and a way of life, vividly illustrating how it shaped the expansion of the American West.

1947

James Phinney Baxter III. Scientists Against Time

1946

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Age of Jackson

1945

Stephen Bonsal. Unfinished Business

1944

Merle Curti. The Growth of American Thought

1943

Esther Forbes. Paul Revere and the World He Lived In

Paul Revere, an amazingly versatile patriot and artisan, was one of the little men living in extraordinary times. Here is an intimate view of the American Revolution presented from the point of view of one man--a man who in many ways embodied the spirit of his age.

1942

Margaret Leech. Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865

1941

Marcus Lee Hansen. The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860

1940

Carl Sandburg. Abraham Lincoln: The War Years

1939

Frank Luther Mott. A History of American Magazines

1938

Paul Herman Buck. The Road to Reunion, 1856-1900

1937

Van Wyck Brooks. The Flowering of New England

1936

Andrew C. McLaughlin. The Constitutional History of the United States

1935

Charles McLean Andrews. The Colonial Period of American History

1934

Herbert Agar. The People's Choice

1933

Frederick J. Turner. The Significance of Sections in American History

1932

John J. Pershing. My Experiences in the World War

1931

Bernadotte E. Schmitt. The Coming of the War: 1914

1930

Claude H. Van Tyne. The War of Independence

1929

Fred Albert Shannon. The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861-1865

1928

Vernon Louis Parrington. Main Currents in American Thought, 2 vols.

1927

Samuel Flagg Bemis. Pickney's Treaty

1926

Edward Canning. The History of the United States

1925

Frederic L. Paxson. A History of the American Frontier

1924

Charles Howard McIlwain. The American Revolution - A Constitutional Interpretation

1923

Charles Warren. The Supreme Court in United States History

1922

James Truslow Adams. The Founding of New England

1921

William Sowden Sims in collaboration with Burton J. Hendrick. The Victory at Sea

1920

Justin H. Smith. The War with Mexico, 2 vols.

1919

No Award given

1918

James Ford Rhodes. A History of the Civil War, 1861-1865

1917

J.J. Jusserand. With Americans of Past and Present Days