The Avery O. Craven Award

For more information about the Organization of American Historians, sponsor of this award, click here.

2018     The thin light of freedom : the Civil War and emancipation in the heart of America by Edward L. Ayers
2017     The slave's cause : a history of abolition by Manisha Sinha
2016     Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes
2015     The half has never been told : slavery and the making of American capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
2013     Freaks of fortune : the emerging world of capitalism and risk in America by Johnathan Levy
2012     A generation at war : the Civil War era in a northern community by Nicole Etcheson
2011     Confederate reckoning : power and politics in the Civil War South by Stephanie McCurry;
honorable mention: Schooling the freed people : teaching, learning, and the struggle for Black freedom, 1861-1876 by Ronald E. Butchart; honorable mention: An example for all the land : emancipation and the struggle over equality in Washington, D.C. by Kate Masur
2010     Terror in the heart of freedom : citizenship, sexual violence, and the meaning of race in the postemancipation South by Hannah Rosen
2009     The problem of emancipation : the Caribbean roots of the American Civil War by Edward B. Rugemer
2008     What this cruel war was over : soldiers, slavery and the Civil War by Chandra Manning
2007     Color-blind justice : Albion Tourgée and the quest for racial equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson by Mark Elliott
2006     A shattered nation : the rise and fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 by Anne Sarah Rubin
2005     The legend of John Wilkes Booth : myth, memory, and a mummy by C. Wyatt Evans
2004     The claims of kinfolk : African American property and community in the nineteenth-century South by Dylan C. Penningroth
2003     The black hearts of men : radical abolitionists and the transformation of race by John Stauffer
2002     The slaveholding republic : an account of the United States government's relations to slavery by Don E. Fehrenbacher [Dr. Fehrenbacher died in 1997, but Ward M. McAfee, California State University-San Bernardino, a former student of Fehrenbacher's, completed and edited the book.]
2001     The political work of Northern women writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872 by Lyde Cullen Sizer
2000     Soul by soul : life inside the antebellum slave market by Walter Johnson
1999     From bondage to contract : wage labor, marriage, and the market in the age of slave emancipation by Amy Dru Stanley
1998     Democratizing the Old Dominion : Virginia and the second party system, 1824-1861 by William G. Shade; Mastered by the clock : time, slavery, and freedom in the American South by Mark M. Smith
1997     Mothers of invention : women of the slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
1996     Voice for the mad : the life of Dorothea Dix by David L. Gollaher
1995     The work of reconstruction : from slave to wage laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 by Julie Saville
1994     Love and theft : blackface minstrelsy and the American working class by Eric Lott
1993     Nativism and slavery : the northern Know Nothings and the politics of the 1850s by Tyler Anbinder
1992     Frederick Douglass by William S. McFeely
1991     Another civil war : labor, capital, and the state in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania, 1840-68 by Grace Palladino
1990     Mind and the American Civil War : a meditation on lost causes by Lewis P. Simpson
1989     Reconstruction : America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877 by Eric Foner
1988     The origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 by William E. Gienapp; Unfree labor : American slavery and Russian serfdom by Peter Kolchin
1987     On the threshold of freedom : masters and slaves in Civil War Georgia by Clarence L. Mohr
1986     When the war was over : the failure of self-reconstruction in the South, 1865-1867 by Dan T. Carter
1985     The road to redemption : Southern politics, 1869-1879 by Michael Perman