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