Merle Curti Award
For more information about the Organization of American Historians, sponsor of this award, click here.
2018 Beyond respectability : the intellectual thought of race women by Brittney C. Cooper
2017 New England bound : slavery and colonization in early America by Wendy Warren (intellectual history); Law and the modern mind : consciousness and responsibility in American legal culture by Susanna L. Blumenthal (social history)
2016 Thinking small : the United States and the lure of community development by Daniel Immerwahr (intellectual history); Corazón de Dixie : Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 by Julie M. Weise (Social history)
2015 Moral minorities and the making of American democracy by Kyle G. Volk [Intellectual History]; Robert Love's warnings : searching for strangers in colonial Boston by Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger [Social History]
2013 The great persuasion : reinventing free markets since the Depression by Angus Burgin [intellectual history]; Indigenous and Atlantic slaveries in New France by Brett Rushforth [social history]
2012 The rights of the defenseless : protecting animals and children in Gilded Age America by Susan J. Pearson [intellectual history]; No man's land : Jamaican guestworkers in America and the global history of deportable labor by Cindy Hahamovitch [social history]
2011 Stayin' alive : the 1970s and the last days of the working class by Jefferson Cowie; Confederate reckoning : power and politics in the Civil War South by Stephanie McCurry
2010 The passage to cosmos : Alexander von Humboldt and the shaping of America by Laura Dassow Walls; Scraping by : wage labor, slavery, and survival in early Baltimore by Seth Rockman; Inventing America's "worst" family : eugenics, Islam, and the fall and rise of the tribe of Ishmael by Nathaniel Deutsch (honorable mention); Passing strange : a Gilded Age tale of love and deception across the color line by Martha A. Sandweiss (honorable mention)
2009 The reaper's garden : death and power in the world of Atlantic slavery by Vincent Brown; The Comanche empire by Pekka Hämäläinen
2008 The slave ship : a human history by Marcus Rediker
2007 Steel drivin' man : John Henry, the untold story of an American legend by Scott Reynolds Nelson [social history]; Calling this place home : women on the Wisconsin frontier, 1850-1925 by Joan M. Jensen (honorable mention); Coolies and cane : race, labor, and sugar in the age of emancipation by Moon-Ho Jung; Transcending capitalism : visions of a new society in modern American thought by Howard Brick (honorable mention)
2006 A new deal for the world : America's vision for human rights by Elizabeth Borgwardt [intellectual history]; The face of decline : the Pennsylvania anthracite region in the twentieth century by Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht [social history]
2005 Huck's raft : a history of American childhood by Steven Mintz [social history]; Conjectures of order : intellectual life and the American South, 1810-1860 by Michael O’Brien [intellectual history]
2004 Jonathan Edwards : a life by George M. Marsden [intellectual history]; One vast winter count : the Native American West before Lewis and Clark by Colin G. Calloway [social history]; A nation under our feet : Black political struggles in the rural South from slavery to the great migration by Steven Hahn [social history]
2003 Rereading sex : battles over sexual knowledge and suppression in nineteenth-century America by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
2002 Race and reunion : the Civil War in American memory by David W. Blight
2001 The dominion of voice : riot, reason, and romance in antebellum politics by Kimberly K. Smith
2000 Forced founders : Indians, debtors, slaves, and the making of the American Revolution in Virginia by Woody Holton
1999 Civic ideals : conflicting visions of citizenship in U.S. history by Rogers M. Smith
1998 Thank you, St. Jude : women's devotion to the patron saint of hopeless causes by Robert A. Orsi
1997 The sacred fire of liberty : James Madison and the founding of the federal republic by Lance Banning; Terrible honesty : mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's by Ann Douglas
1996 Gay New York : gender, urban culture, and the making of the gay male world, 1890-1940 by George Chauncey
1995 The masterless : self & society in modern America by Wilfred M. McClay
1994 Lynching in the New South : Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 by W. Fitzhugh Brundage
1993 John Dewey and American democracy by Robert B. Westbrook
1992 The wages of whiteness : race and the making of the American working class by David R. Roediger
1991 The heart of the Commonwealth : society and political culture in Worcester County Massachusetts, 1713-1861 by John L. Brooke; Worlds of wonder, days of judgment : popular religious belief in early New England by David D. Hall
1990 The Indians' new world : Catawbas and their neighbors from European contact through the era of removal by James H. Merrell
1989 Inventing the people : the rise of popular sovereignty in England and America by Edmund S. Morgan
1988 Like a family : the making of a Southern cotton mill world by Jacquelyn Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones and Christopher B. Daly; Between the devil and the deep blue sea : merchant seamen, pirates, and the Anglo-American maritime world, 1700-1750 by Marcus Rediker
1987 Uncertain victory : social democracy and progressivism in European and American thought, 1870-1920 by James T. Kloppenberg
1986 Emigrants and exiles : Ireland and the Irish exodus to North America by Kerby A. Miller
1985 The old Christian right : the Protestant far right from the Great Depression to the cold war by Leo Ribuffo
1984 From Italy to San Francisco : the immigrant experience by Dino Cinel
1983 Moral philosophy at seventeenth-century Harvard : a discipline in transition by Norman Fiering
1982 White supremacy : a comparative study in American and South African history by George Frederickson
1981 The making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America by James T. Schleifer
1980 A shopkeeper's millennium : society and revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 by Paul E. Johnson; Women at work : the transformation of work and community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 by Thomas Dublin
1979 Inventing America : Jefferson's Declaration of Independence by Gary Wills
1977 The Enlightenment in America by Henry F. May