The Bancroft Prize
For more information about the Bancroft Prize, awarded by Columbia University in New York City, click here.
2018
Implacable foes : war in the Pacific, 1944-1945 by Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio
God's red son : the Ghost Dance religion and the making of modern America by Louis S. Warren
Darkness falls on the land of light : experiencing religious awakenings in eighteenth-century New England by Douglas L. Winiarski
2017
The other slavery : the uncovered story of Indian enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez
Blood in the water : the Attica prison uprising of 1971 and its legacy by Heather Ann Thompson
Remaking the American patient : how Madison Avenue and modern medicine turned patients into consumers by Nancy Tomes
2016
Madison's hand : revising the Constitutional Convention by Mary Sarah Bilder
The saltwater frontier : Indians and the contest for the American coast by Andrew Lipman
Border law : the first Seminole War and American nationhood by Deborah A. Rosen
2015
Empire of cotton : a global history by Sven Beckert
The Empire of Necessity : slavery, freedom, and deception in the New World by Greg Grandin
2014
Fear itself : the New Deal and the origins of our time by Ira Katznelson
A misplaced massacre : struggling over the memory of Sand Creek by Ari Kelman
2013
The mortal sea : fishing the Atlantic in the age of sail by W. Jeffrey Bolster
Lincoln's code : the laws of war in American history by John Fabian Witt
2012
Courage to dissent : Atlanta and the long history of the civil rights movement by Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Empires, nations, and families : a history of the North American West, 1800–1860 by Anne F. Hyde
Age of fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers
2011
Ourselves unborn : a history of the fetus in modern America by Sara Dubow
The fiery trial : Abraham Lincoln and American slavery by Eric Foner
Freedom bound : law, labor, and civic identity in colonizing English America, 1580-1865 by Christopher Tomlins
2010
Dorothea Lange : a life beyond limits by Linda Gordon
Abigail Adams by Woody Holton
White mother to a dark race : settler colonialism, maternalism, and the removal of indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 by Margaret D. Jacobs
2009
Killing for coal : America's deadliest labor war by Thomas G. Andrews
This republic of suffering : death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
The Comanche empire by Pekka Hämäläinen
2008
The cigarette century : the rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America by Allan M. Brandt
The populist vision by Charles Postel
Our savage neighbors : how Indian war transformed early America by Peter Silver
2007
Mockingbird song : ecological landscapes of the South by Jack Temple Kirby
William James : in the maelstrom of American modernism by Robert D. Richardson
2006
Dwelling place : a plantation epic by Erskine Clarke
The global cold war : third world interventions and the making of our times by Odd Arne Westad
The rise of American democracy : Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz
2005
Israel on the Appomattox : a Southern experiment in Black freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War by Melvin Patrick Ely
From Jim Crow to civil rights : the Supreme Court and the struggle for racial equality by Michael J. Klarman
Conjectures of order : intellectual life and the American South, 1810–1860 by Michael O’Brien
2004
In the presence of mine enemies : war in the heart of America, 1859-1863 by Edward L. Ayers
A nation under our feet : Black political struggles in the rural South from slavery to the great migration by Steven Hahn
Jonathan Edwards : a life by George M. Marsden
2003
Captives & cousins : slavery, kinship, and community in the Southwest borderlands by James F. Brooks
The Indian slave trade : the rise of the English empire in the American South, 1670-1717 by Alan Gallay
2002
Race and reunion : the Civil War in American memory by David W. Blight
In pursuit of equity : women, men, and the quest for economic citizenship in 20th century America by Alice Kessler-Harris
2001
Roaring camp : the social world of the California gold rush by Susan Lee Johnson
The chief: the life of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw
2000
Into the American woods : negotiators on the American frontier by James H. Merrell
Embracing defeat : Japan in the wake of World War II by John Dower
The great Arizona orphan abduction by Linda Gordon
1999
Many thousands gone : the first two centuries of slavery in North America by Ira Berlin
Slave counterpoint : Black culture in eighteenth-century Chesapeake and Lowcountry by Philip D. Morgan
The name of war : King Philip's War and the origins of American identity by Jill Lepore
1998
Southern cross : the beginnings of the Bible Belt by Christine Leigh Heyrman
The clash : a history of U.S.-Japan relations by Walter LaFeber
The origins of the urban crisis : race and inequality in postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue
1997
Explicit and authentic acts : amending the U.S. constitution, 1776-1995 by David E. Kyvig
Grand expectations : the United States, 1945-1974 by James T. Patterson
1996
William Cooper's town : power and persuasion on the frontier of the early American republic by Alan Taylor
Walt Whitman's America : a cultural biography by David S. Reynolds
1995
The refiner's fire : the making of Mormon cosmology, 1644-1844 by John L. Brooke
Local people : the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer
1994
The age of Federalism by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick
Tumult and silence at Second Creek : an inquiry into a Civil War slave conspiracy by Winthrop D. Jordan
W.E.B. Du Bois : the biography of a race, 1868-1919 by David Levering Lewis
1993
Margaret Fuller : an American romantic life, volume 1 : the private years by Charles Capper
A preponderance of power : national security, the Truman administration, and the Cold War by Melvyn P. Leffler
1992
Nature's metropolis : Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon
The destructive war : William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans by Charles Royster
1991
Making a new deal : industrial workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 by Lizabeth Cohen
A midwife's tale : the life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
1990
The Indians' new world : Catawbas and their neighbors from European contact through the era of removal by James H. Merrell
Dark journey : black Mississippians in the age of Jim Crow by Neil R. McMillen
1989
Reconstruction : America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877 by Eric Foner
Inventing the people : the rise of popular sovereignty in England and America by Edmund S. Morgan
1988
The rise of American air power : the creation of Armageddon by Michael S. Sherry
Unfree labor : American slavery and Russian serfdom by Peter Kolchin
1987
A vigorous spirit of enterprise : merchants and economic development in Revolutionary Philadelphia by Thomas Doerflinger
Roots of violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900 by Roger Lane
1986
Crabgrass frontier : the suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson
Labor of love, labor of sorrow : Black women, work, and the family from slavery to the present by Jacqueline Jones
1985
The free women of Petersburg : status and culture in a southern town, 1784-1860 by Suzanne Lebsock
The life and times of Cotton Mather by Kenneth Silverman
1984
Booker T. Washington : the wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 by Louis R. Harlan
The social transformation of American medicine by Paul Starr
1983
Entertaining Satan : witchcraft and the culture of early New England by John Putnam Demos
Eugene V. Debs : citizen and socialist by Nick Salvatore
1982
A people in revolution : the American revolution and political society in New York, 1760-1790 by Edward Countryman
Cradle of the middle class : the family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 by Mary P. Ryan
1981
Walter Lippmann and the American century by Ronald Steel
Alice James: a biography by Jean Strouse
1980
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American foreign policy, 1932-1945 by Robert Dallek
Women at work : the transformation of work and community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 by Thomas Dublin
Dust Bowl : the southern plains in the 1930s by Donald Worster (25th anniversary edition here)
1979
Allies of a kind : the United States, Britain, and the war against Japan, 1941-1945 by Christopher Thorne
Rockdale : the growth of an American village in the early industrial revolution by Anthony F. C. Wallace
1978
The visible hand : the managerial revolution in American business by Alfred D. Chandler Jr.
The transformation of American law, 1780-1860 by Morton J. Horwitz
1977
Class and community : the industrial revolution in Lynn by Alan Dawley
The minutemen and their world by Robert A. Gross
Slave population and economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834 by Barry W. Higman
1976
The problem of slavery in the age of revolution, 1770-1823 by David Brion Davis
Edith Wharton : a biography by R. W. B. Lewis
1975
Time on the cross : the economics of American Negro slavery and Time on the cross : evidence and methods--a supplement by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman
Deterrence in American foreign policy : theory and practice by Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke
Roll, Jordan, roll : the world the slaves made by Eugene Genovese
1974
Frederick Jackson Turner : historian, scholar, teacher by Ray Allen Billington
The devil and John Foster Dulles by Townsend Hoopes
The other Bostonians : poverty and progress in the American metropolis, 1880-1970 by Stephan Thernstrom
1973
Fire in the lake : the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam by Frances FitzGerald
The United States and the origins of the cold war, 1941-1947 by John Lewis Gaddis
Booker T. Washington ; the making of a Black leader, 1856-1901 by Louis R. Harlan
1972
Neither Black nor white ; slavery and race relations in Brazil and the United States by Carl N. Degler
The Mathers : three generations of Puritan intellectuals, 1596-1728 by Robert Middlekauff
The European discovery of America, volume 1 : the northern voyages, A.D. 500-1600 by Samuel Eliot Morison
1971
A history of broadcasting in the United States, volume 3 : The image empire : from 1953 by Erik Barnouw
Birth control in America : the career of Margaret Sanger by David M. Kennedy
Andrew Carnegie by Joseph Frazier Wall
1970
Charles Willson Peale by Charles Coleman Sellers
The creation of the American republic, 1776-1787 by Gordon S. Wood
Scottsboro : a tragedy of the American South by Dan T. Carter (Rev. ed. (2007) here)
1969
White over black : American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 by Winthrop D. Jordan
Woodrow Wilson and world politics : America's response to war and revolution by N. Gordon Levin Jr.
The brains trust by Rexford Guy Tugwell
1968
A history of Negro education in the South from 1619 to the present by Henry Allen Bullock
From Puritan to Yankee : character and social order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 by Richard L. Bushman
The ideological origins of the American revolution by Bernard Bailyn
1967
Prelude to civil war : the nullification controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 by William W. Freehling
James K. Polk, volume 2 : Continentalist, 1843-1846 by Charles Sellers
The Washington community, 1800-1828 by James Sterling Young
1966
The peacemakers : the great powers and American independence by Richard B. Morris
Between two empires : the ordeal of the Philippines, 1929-1946 by Theodore W. Friend III
1965
Castlereagh and Adams : England and the United States, 1812-1823 by Bradford Perkins
Portrait of a general : Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence by William B. Willcox
The United States and the Far Eastern crisis of 1933-1938; from the Manchurian incident through the initial stage of the undeclared Sino-Japanese war by Dorothy Borg
1964
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 by William E. Leuchtenburg
The liberator : William Lloyd Garrison, a biography by John L. Thomas
Power, freedom, and diplomacy: the foreign policy of the United States of America by Paul Seabury
1963
John Adams by Page Smith
Pearl Harbor : warning and decision by Roberta Wohlstetter
The might of nations: world politics in our time by John G. Stoessinger (rev. ed (1965) here; 3d ed (1969) here)
1962
The transformation of the school : progressivism in American education, 1876-1957 by Lawrence A. Cremin
To the Farewell address : ideas of early American foreign policy by Felix Gilbert
Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1866 by Martin B. Duberman
1961
The Jefferson image in the American mind by Merrill D. Peterson
Wilson, volume 3 : the struggle for neutrality, 1914-1915 by Arthur S. Link
1960
The age of the democratic revolution : a political history of Europe and America, 1760-1800 by R. R. Palmer
In the days of McKinley by Margaret Leech
1959
Henry Adams, the middle years by Ernest Samuels
The Americans ; the colonial experience by Daniel J. Boorstin
1958
The age of Roosevelt, volume 1 : the crisis of the old order, 1919-1933 by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
A history of American magazines, volume 4 : 1885-1905 by Frank Luther Mott
1957
Soviet-American relations, 1917-1920, volume 1 : Russia leaves the war by George F. Kennan
Wilson, volume 2 : the new freedom by Arthur S. Link
1956
Henry Adams, a biography by Elizabeth Stevenson
Lincoln, the President by J. G. Randall and Richard N. Current
1955
Great river : the Rio Grande in North American history by Paul Horgan
The Jacksonians ; a study in administrative history, 1829-1861 by Leonard D. White
1954
Seedtime of the Republic ; the origin of the American tradition of political liberty by Clinton Rossiter
The undeclared war, 1940-1941 by William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason
1953
The era of good feelings by George Dangerfield
Rendezvous with destiny; a history of modern American reform by Eric F. Goldman
1952
Charles Evans Hughes by Merlo J. Pusey
Origins of the new South, 1877-1913 by C. Vann Woodward
1951
Our more perfect union; from eighteenth-century principles to twentieth century practice by Arthur N. Holcombe
Virgin land; the American West as symbol and myth by Henry N. Smith
1950
The great war for the Empire, volume 7 : The victorious year, 1758-1760 by Lawrence H. Gipson (rev. ed. here)
Coronado ; knight of pueblos and plains by Herbert E. Bolton
1949
Roosevelt and Hopkins, an intimate history by Robert E. Sherwood
History of United States naval operations in World War II, volume 3: The rising sun in the Pacific by Samuel E. Morison
1948
Ordeal of the Union by Allan Nevins
Across the wide Missouri by Bernard DeVoto