The Francis Parkman Prize

For more information about the Society of American Historians, sponsors of The Francis Parkman Prize, click here.

2018     Great crossings : Indians, settlers, and slaves in the Age of Jackson by Christina Snyder
2017     Black Elk : the life of an American visionary by Joe Jackson
2016     American apostles : when evangelicals entered the world of Islam by Christine Leigh Heyrman
2015     Our Declaration : a reading of the Declaration of Independence in defense of equality by Danielle Allen
2014     A cruel and shocking act : the secret history of the Kennedy assassination by Philip Shenon
2013     Embers of war : the fall of an empire and the making of America's Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall
2012     Railroaded : the transcontinentals and the making of modern America by Richard White
2011     Stayin' alive : the 1970s and the last days of the working class by Jefferson Cowie
2010     Cheever : a life by Blake Bailey
2009     On Zion's mount : Mormons, Indians, and the American landscape by Jared Farmer
2008     FDR by Jean Edward Smith
2007     Empires of the Atlantic world : Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 by John Huxtable Elliott
2006     The Peabody sisters : three women who ignited American romanticism by Megan Marshall
2005     Shades of Hiawatha : staging Indians, making Americans : 1880-1930 by Alan Trachtenberg
2004     A murder in Virginia : Southern justice on trial by Suzanne Lebsock
2003     Captives & cousins : slavery, kinship, and community in the Southwest borderlands by James F. Brooks
2002     The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand
2001     Crucible of war : the Seven Years' War and the fate of empire in British North America, 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson
2000     Freedom from fear : the American people in depression and war, 1929-1945 by David M. Kennedy
1999     The contested plains : Indians, goldseekers, & the rush to Colorado by Elliott West
1998     Rising tide : the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America by John M. Barry
1997     Mothers of invention : women of the slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
1996     Emerson : the mind on fire : a biography by Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
1995     The unredeemed captive : a family story from early America by John Demos
1994     W. E. B. Du Bois--biography of a race, 1868-1919 by David Levering Lewis
1993     Truman by David McCullough
1992     The middle ground : Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650-1815 by Richard White
1991     A new Andalucia and a way to the Orient : the American Southeast during the sixteenth century by Paul E. Hoffman
1990     A first class temperament; the emergence of Franklin Roosevelt by Geoffrey C. Ward
1989     Reconstruction : America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877 by Eric Foner
1988     Commander in chief : Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his lieutenants, and their war by Eric Larrabee
1987     A machine that would go of itself : the Constitution in American culture by Michael Kammen
1986     Crabgrass frontier : the suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson
1985     The crucible of race : black/white relations in the American South since emancipation by Joel Williamson
1984     Changes in the land : Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England by William Cronon
1983     Common landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 by John R. Stilgoe
1982     Grant : a biography by William S. McFeely
1981     A revolutionary people at war : the Continental Army and American character, 1775-1783 by Charles Royster
1980     Been in the storm so long : the aftermath of slavery by Leon F. Litwack
1979     The Potawatomis, keepers of the fire by R. David Edmunds
1978     The path between the seas : the creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 by David McCullough
1977     World of our fathers by Irving Howe, with the assistance of Kenneth Libo
1976     American slavery, American freedom : the ordeal of colonial Virginia by Edmund S. Morgan
1975     The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
1974     Stephen A. Douglas by Robert W. Johannsen
1973     FDR : the beckoning of destiny, 1882-1928; a history by Kenneth S. Davis
1972     Eleanor and Franklin; the story of their relationship, based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s private papers by Joseph P. Lash
1971     Roosevelt : the soldier of freedom by James MacGregor Burns
1970     The first summit; Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay 1941 by Theodore A. Wilson
1969     White over black : American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 by Winthrop D. Jordan
1968     No award
1967     Exploration and empire; the explorer and the scientist in the winning of the American West by William H. Goetzmann
1966     The Americans : the national experience by Daniel J. Boorstin
1965     Rehearsal for Reconstruction : the Port Royal experiment by Willie Lee Rose
1964     Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 by William Edward Leuchtenburg
1963     That wilder image; the painting of America’s native school from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer by James Thomas Flexner
1962     Little brown brother; how the United States purchased and pacified the Philippine Islands at the century’s turn by Leon Wolff
1961     Turmoil and tradition; a study of the life and times of Henry L. Stimson by Elting E. Morison
1960     Edison : a biography by Matthew Josephson
1959     Henry Adams : the middle years by Ernest Samuels
1958     The age of Roosevelt : volume 1 : Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.