The Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize

For more information about the History of Science Society, sponsor of these awards, click here.

2018     Orchid : a cultural history by Jim Endersby
2017     The dancing bees : Karl von Frisch and the discovery of the honeybee language by Tania Munz
2016     Arming Mother Nature : the birth of catastrophic environmentalism by Jacob Darwin Hamblin
2015     Earth's deep history : how it was discovered and why it matters by M. J. S. Rudwick
2014     The visioneers : how a group of elite scientists pursued space colonies, nanotechnologies, and a limitless future by W. Patrick McCray
2013     How the hippies saved physics : science, counterculture, and the quantum revival by David Kaiser
2012     Nature's ghosts : confronting extinction from the age of Jefferson to the age of ecology by Mark Barrow
2011     Merchants of doubt : how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
2010     The day we found the universe by Marcia Bartusiak
2009     Sun in a bottle : the strange history of fusion and the science of wishful thinking by Charles Seife
2008     Fathoming the ocean : the discovery and exploration of the deep sea by Helen Rozwadowski
2007     Francis Crick : discoverer of the genetic code by Matt Ridley
2006     Pandora's baby : how the first test tube babies sparked the reproductive revolution by Robin Marantz Henig
2005     Goldberger's war : the life and work of a public health crusader by Alan M. Kraut
2004     The Manhattan Project : big science and the atomic bomb by Jeff Hughes
2003     The measure of all things : the seven-year odyssey and hidden error that transformed the world by Ken Alder
2002     Revolutionizing the sciences : European knowledge and its ambitions, 1500-1700 by Peter Dear
2001     The gospel of germs : men, women, and the microbe in American life by Nancy Tomes
2000     Reel nature : America's romance with wildlife on film by Gregg Mitman
1999     The Baltimore case : a trial of politics, science and character by Daniel J. Kevles
1998     Lise Meitner : a life in physics by Ruth Lewin Sime
1997     Dark sun : the making of the hydrogen bomb by Richard Rhodes
1996     Newton and the culture of Newtonianism by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob
1995     A history of mathematics : an introduction by Victor J. Katz
1994     The beginnings of Western science : the European scientific tradition in philosophical, religious, and institutional context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 by David C. Lindberg (2d ed. (2007) here)
1993     Darwin : the life of a tormented evolutionist by James Moore and Adrian Desmond
1992     Science and religion : some historical perspectives by John Hedley Brooke
1991     Medieval & early Renaissance medicine : an introduction to knowledge and practice by Nancy G. Siraisi
1990     The space telescope : a study of NASA science, technology, and policy by Robert W. Smith
1989     Fasting girls : the emergence of anorexia nervosa as a modern disease by Joan Jacobs Brumberg
1988     The dilemmas of an upright man : Max Planck as spokesman for German science by John L. Heilbron
1987     Science and the Enlightenment by Thomas L. Hankins
1986     The discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin