Subject Guide: History

Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award
This prize is given for the most original book on the coming of the Civil War, the Civil War years, or the Era of Reconstruction. Click Organization of American Historians for more information about the sponsor of this award. This award was formerly known as the Avery O. Craven Award.

2024  I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction by Kidada E. Williams
2023  Administering freedom : the state of emancipation after the Freedmen's Bureau by Dale Kretz
2022  Rites of retaliation : civilization, soldiers, and campaigns in the Civil War by Lorien Foote; Monumental : Oscar Dunn and his radical fight in Reconstruction Louisiana by Brian K. Mitchell; Barrington S. Edwards; and Nick Weldon
2021  The women's fight : the Civil War's battles for home, freedom, and nation by Thavolia Glymph
2020  Sweet taste of liberty : a true story of slavery and restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel
2019  Embattled freedom : journeys through the Civil War's slave refugee camps by Amy Murrell Taylor
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; After Appomattox : military occupation and the ends of war by Gregory P. Downs (honorable mention)
2015  The half has never been told : slavery and the making of American capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
2014  A misplaced massacre : struggling over the memory of Sand Creek by Ari Kelman; Remembering the Civil War: reunion and the limits of reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney (honorable mention); River of dark dreams : slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom by Walter Johnson (honrable mention)
2013  Freaks of fortune : the emerging world of capitalism and risk in America by Jonathan 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 McCurr; 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 (honorable mention)
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  Baltimore County, 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 with Ward M. McAfee
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 William G. Shade; and 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, 1840–1968 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, ; and 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

Merle Curti Intellectual History Award
The Merle Curti Intellectual History Award is given annually for the best book in social, intellectual, and/or cultural history. The committee may decide to give the award to two books, one in social history and one in intellectual history. Click Organization of American Historians for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2024   The Poverty of the World: Discovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1935–1973 by Sheyda F.A. Jahanbani (intellectual history) ; Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights by Dylan Penningroth (social history)
2023  Heathen : religion and race in American history by Kathryn Gin Lum (intellectual history); 2023  Only the clothes on her back : clothing and the hidden history of power in the nineteenth-century United States by Laura F. Edwards (social history)
2022  Building the population bomb by Emily Klancher Merchant (intellectual history); Race, removal, and the right to remain : migration and the making of the United States by Samantha Seeley (social history)
2021  The Young Lords : a radical history by Johanna Fernández (social history); Those who know don’t say : the Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the carceral state by Garrett Felber (intellectual history); Injury impoverished : workplace accidents, capitalism, and law in the progressive era by Nate Holdren (honorable mention)
2020  In the shadows of justice : postwar liberalism and the remaking of political philosophy by Katrina Forrester (intellectual history); They were her property : white women as slave owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (social history); Polygamy : an early American history by Sarah M. S. Pearsall (honorable mention); Voices of the enslaved : love, labor, and longing in French Louisiana by Sophie White (honorable mention)
2019  The known citizen : a history of privacy in modern America by Sarah E. Igo (intellectual history); Embattled freedom : journeys through the Civil War's slave refugee camps by Amy Murrell Taylor (social history)
2018  Beyond respectability : the intellectual thought of race women by Brittney C. Cooper (intellectual history); The dawn of Detroit : a chronicle of slavery and freedom in the city of the straits by Tiya Miles (social history)
2017  New England bound : slavery and colonization in early America by Wendy Warren (social history); Law and the modern mind : consciousness and responsibility in American legal culture by Susanna L. Blumenthal (intellectual 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]; Bonds of alliance : 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 makings 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 (Rev. ed. (1999) here)
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

Ellis W. Hawley Prize
The Ellis W. Hawley Prize is awarded annually for the best book-length historical study of the political economy, politics, or institutions of the United States, in its domestic or international affairs, from the Civil War to the present. Click Organization of American Historians for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2024  Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights by Dylan Penningroth
2023  G-Man : J. Edgar Hoover and the making of the American century by Beverly Gage
2022  The bonds of inequality : debt and the making of the American city by Destin Jenkins
2021  The American Jewish philanthropic complex : the history of a multibillion-dollar institution by Lila Corwin Berman
2020  Race for profit : how banks and the real estate industry undermined black home ownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
2019  The Chinese must go : violence, exclusion, and the making of the alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams
2018  The Republic for which it stands : the United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 by Richard White
2017  Free speech and unfree news : the paradox of press freedom in America by Sam Lebovic
2016  Liberty and coercion : the paradox of American government from the founding to the present by Gary Gerstle
2015  The invaded : how Latin Americans and their allies fought and ended U.S. occupations by Alan McPherson
2014  Plutopia : nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters by Kate Brown
2013  Freaks of fortune : the emerging world of capitalism and risk in America by Johnathan Levy
2012  From Bible Belt to Sunbelt : plain-folk religion, grassroots politics, and the rise of evangelical conservatism by Darren Dochuk
2011  The hungry world : America's Cold War battle against poverty in Asia by Nick Cullather; Manhattan projects : the rise and fall of urban renewal in Cold War New York by Samuel Zipp (honorable mention)
2010  The straight state : sexuality and citizenship in twentieth-century America by Margot Canaday
2009  What comes naturally : miscegenation law and the making of race in America by Peggy Pascoe
2008  Colored property : state policy and white racial politics in suburban America by David M. P. Freund; Inventing the "American Way" : the politics of consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights movement by Wendy L. Wall
2007  The prison and the gallows : the politics of mass incarceration in America by Marie Gottschalk
2006  Pocketbook politics : economic citizenship in twentieth-century America by Meg Jacobs
2005  Downtown America : a history of the place and the people who made it by Alison Isenberg
2004  For all these rights : business, labor, and the shaping of America's public-private welfare state by Jennifer Klein
2003  Regulating railroad innovation : business, technology, and politics in America, 1840-1920 by Steven W. Usselman
2002  Race and reunion : the Civil War in American memory by David W. Blight
2001  Ben Tillman & the reconstruction of white supremacy by Stephen Kantrowitz
2000  Taxing America : Wilbur Mills, Congress, and the state, 1945-1975 by Julian E. Zelizer
1999  Atlantic crossings : social politics in a progressive age by Daniel T. Rodgers
1998  The clash : a history of U.S.-Japan relations by Walter LaFeber
1997  From opportunity to entitlement : the transformation and decline of Great Society liberalism by Gareth Davies

Darlene Clark Hine Award
The Darlene Clark Hine Award is given annually by the Organization of American Historians to the author of the best book in African American women's and gender history. Click Organization of American Historians for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2024  Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar by Barbara Savage
2023  Civil rights queen : Constance Baker Motley and the struggle for equality by Tomiko Brown-Nagin
2022  All that she carried : the journey of Ashley's sack, a Black family keepsake by Tiya Alicia Miles
2021  The women's fight : the Civil War's battles for home, freedom, and nation by Thavolia Glymph; A Black women’s history of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
2020  Banking on freedom : black women in U.S. finance before the New Deal by Shennette Garrett-Scott
2019  Set the world on fire : black nationalist women and the global struggle for freedom by Keisha N. Blain; A girl stands at the door : the generation of young women who desegregated America’s schools by Rachel Devlin (honorable mention); Glory in their spirit : how four black women took on the Army during World War II by Sandra M. Bolzenius (honorable mention)
2018  Medical bondage : race, gender, and the origins of American gynecology by Deirdre Cooper Owens; The promise of patriarchy : women and the Nation of Islam by ​Ula Yvette Taylor (honorable mention); Remaking Black power : how Black women transformed an era by Ashley D. Farmer
2017  Sex workers, psychics, and numbers runners : black women in New York City’s underground economy by LaShawn D. Harris
2016  Chained in silence : black women and convict labor in the New South by Talitha L. LeFlouria
2015  Notes from a colored girl : the Civil War pocket diaries of Emilie Frances Davis by Karsonya Wise Whitehead
2014  Redefining rape : sexual violence in the era of suffrage and segregation by Estelle B. Freedman
2013  To free a family : the journey of Mary Walker by Sydney Nathans
2012  Reasoning from race : feminism, law, and the civil rights revolution by Serena Mayeri
2011  Jesus, jobs, and justice : African American women and religion by Bettye Collier-Thomas; Talk with you like a woman : African American women, justice, and reform in New York, 1890–1935 by Cheryl D. Hicks (honorable mention); At the dark end of the street : black women, rape, and resistance - a new history of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire (honorable mention)
2010  Sojourner Truth's America by Margaret Washington; Upbuilding Black Durham : gender, class, and Black community development in the Jim Crow South by Leslie Brown (honorable mention); Southern horrors : women and the politics of rape and lynching by Crystal N. Feimster (honorable mention)

Richard W. Leopold Prize
The Richard W. Leopold Prize was designed to improve contacts and interrelationships within the historical profession where an increasing number of history-trained scholars hold distinguished positions in governmental agencies. This prize recognizes the significant historical work being done by historians outside academe. The Leopold Prize is given by the Organization of American Historians every two years for the best book written by a historian connected with federal, state or municipal government. Areas of study include: foreign policy, military affairs broadly construed, the activities of the federal government or biography in one of the foregoing areas. Click Organization of American Historians for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2024  Heritage Conservation in the United States: Enhancing the Presence of the Past by John H. Sprinkle, Jr.
2022  Between containment and rollback : the United States and the Cold War in Germany by Christian Friedrich Ostermann
2020  Oil and the great powers : Britain and Germany, 1914–1945 by Anand Toprani
2017  Pershing's crusaders : the American soldier in World War I by Richard S. Faulkner.
2016  Bringing God to men : American military chaplains and the Vietnam War by Jacqueline E. Whitt
2014  The wars for Asia, 1911–1949 by S. C. M. Paine
2012  Freedom by the sword : the U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867 by William A. Dobak
2010  The road to Yucca Mountain : the development of radioactive waste policy in the United States by J. Samuel Walker
2008  Von Braun : dreamer of space, engineer of war by Michael J. Neufeld
2006  Breaking the color barrier : the U.S. Naval Academy's first black midshipmen and the struggle for racial equality by Robert J. Schneller, Jr.
2004  American soldiers : ground combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam by Peter S. Kindsvatter
2002  Spies and commandos : how America lost the secret war in North Vietnam by Dale Andradé and Kenneth Conboy
2000  Reporting Vietnam : media and military at war by William M. Hammond
1998  To see the unseen : a history of planetary radar astronomy by Andrew J. Butrica
1996  Elements of controversy : the Atomic Energy Commission and radiation safety in nuclear weapons testing, 1947-1974 by Barton C. Hacker
1994  The origins of SDI, 1944-1983 by Donald R. Baucom
1992  Press gallery : Congress and the Washington correspondents by Donald A. Ritchie
1990  Atoms for peace and war, 1953-1961 : Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission by Richard Greening Hewlett and Jack M. Holl
1988  The United States and Italy, 1940-1950 : the politics and diplomacy of stabilization by James Edward Miller
1986  History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, volume 1 : the formative years, 1947-1950 by Steven L. Rearden
1984  A patron for pure science : the National Science Foundation's formative years, 1945-1957 by J. Merton England

Lawrence W. Levine Award
The Lawrence W. Levine Award is given annually by the Organization of American Historians to the author of the best book in American cultural history. Click Organization of American Historians for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2024  Radical Play: Revolutionizing Children’s Toys in 1960s and 1970s America by Rob Goldberg
2023  Resisting change in suburbia : Asian immigrants and frontier nostalgia in L.A. by James Zarsadiaz
2022  All that she carried : the journey of Ashley's sack, a Black family keepsake by Tiya Alicia Miles
2021  Franchise : the golden arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain
2020  Speaking with the dead in early America by Erik R. Seeman
2019  The injustice never leaves you : anti-Mexican violence in Texas by Monica Muñoz Martinez
2018  The heart of the Mission : Latino art and politics in San Francisco by Cary Cordova
2017  Kīkā kila : how the Hawaiian steel guitar changed the sound of modern music by John W. Troutman
2016  A nation of neighborhoods : imagining cities, communities, and democracy in postwar America by  Benjamin Looker
2015  A chosen exile : a history of racial passing in American life by  Allyson Hobbs
2014  At the edge of sight : photography and the unseen by Shawn Michelle Smith; Sacred relics : pieces of the past in nineteenth-century America by Teresa Barnett (honorable mention)
2013  Aloha America : hula circuits through the U.S. empire by Adria L. Imada
2012  Pox : an American history by Michael Willrich
2011  Not in this family : gays and the meaning of kinship in postwar North America by Heather Murray
2010  Foul bodies : cleanliness in early America by Kathleen M. Brown
2009  What comes naturally : miscegenation law and the making of race in America by Peggy Pascoe
2008  Tribe, race, history : Native Americans in southern New England, 1780–1880 by Daniel R. Mandell

Liberty Legacy Foundation Award
Inspired by OAH President Darlene Clark Hine's call in her 2002 OAH presidential address for more research on the origins of the civil rights movement in the period before 1954, the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award is given for the best book on any historical aspect of the struggle for civil rights in the United States from the nation's founding to the present. Click Organization of American Historians for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2024  The Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington’s Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan’s America by Gordon K. Mantler
2023  Free Joan Little : the politics of race, sexual violence, and imprisonment by Christina Greene
2022 Traveling Black : a story of race and resistance by Mia Bay
2021  The Young Lords : a radical history by Johanna Fernández; Pauulu’s diaspora : Black internationalism and environmental justice by Quito J. Swan (honorable mention)
2020  Race for profit : how banks and the real estate industry undermined black home ownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
2019  Birthright citizens : a history of race and rights in antebellum America by Martha S. Jones
2018  The promise of patriarchy : women and the Nation of Islam by Ula Yvette Taylor
2017  We are an African people : independent education, black power, and the radical imagination by Russell Rickford
2016  Liberated threads : Black women, style, and the global politics of soul by Tanisha C. Ford
2015  A world more concrete : real estate and the remaking of Jim Crow South Florida by N. D. B. Connolly
2014  Defining the struggle : national organizing for racial justice, 1880–1915 by Susan D. Carle
2013  The land was ours : African American beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South by Andrew W. Kahrl
2012  Courage to dissent : Atlanta and the long history of the civil rights movement by Tomiko Brown-Nagin
2011  Torchbearers of democracy : African American soldiers in the World War I era by Chad L. Williams
2010  Family properties : race, real estate, and the exploitation of Black urban America by Beryl Satter
2009  The senator and the sharecropper : the freedom struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer by Chris Myers Asch
2008  Going down Jericho Road : the Memphis strike, Martin Luther King's last campaign by Michael Honey; New Orleans after the promises : poverty, citizenship and the search for a Great Society by Kent Germany (finalist); Battling the plantation mentality : Memphis and the Black freedom struggle by Laurie Green (finalist)
2007  From civil rights to human rights : Martin Luther King, Jr. and the struggle for economic justice by Thomas F. Jackson
2006  Up South : civil rights and Black power in Philadelphia by Matthew J. Countryman; A little taste of freedom : the Black freedom struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi by Emilye Crosby (honorable mention)
2005  Black is a country : race and the unfinished struggle for democracy by Nikhil Pal Singh
2004  Civil rights unionism : tobacco workers and the struggle for democracy in the mid-twentieth century South by Robert Rodgers Korstad; Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement : a radical democratic vision by Barbara Ransby
2003  Dividing lines : municipal politics and the struggle for civil rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma by J. Mills Thornton III

David Montgomery Award
The David Montgomery Award is given annually by the OAH with co-sponsorship by the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) for the best book on a topic in American labor and working-class history. Click Organization of American Historians for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2024  The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal by Joan Flores-Villalobos
2023  Menace to empire : anticolonial solidarities and the transpacific origins of the US security state by Moon-Ho Jung
2022  A new working class : the legacies of public-sector employment in the Civil Rights Movement by Jane Berger
2021  Migrant citizenship : race, rights, and reform in the U.S. farm labor camp program by Verónica Martínez-Matsuda
2020  Latinos and the liberal city : politics and protest in San Francisco by Eduardo Contreras; Hattiesburg : an American city in black and white by William Sturkey (honorable mention)
2019  Undocumented lives : the untold story of Mexican migration by Ana Raquel Minian
2018  Knocking on labor's door : union organizing in the 1970s and the roots of a new economic divide by Lane Windham.
2017  Deregulating desire : flight attendant activism, family politics, and workplace justice by Ryan Patrick Murphy
2016  Struggle for the soul of the postwar South : white evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf
2015  Seasons of change : labor, treaty rights, and Ojibwe nationhood by Chantal Norrgard; With sails whitening every sea : mariners and the making of an American maritime empire by Brian Rouleau (honorable mention)
2014  Freedom's frontier : California and the struggle over unfree labor, emancipation, and reconstruction by Stacey L. Smith

Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize
The Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize is given for "the most original" book in U.S. Women's and/or Gender History. The OAH defines "the most original" book as one that is a path breaking work or challenges and/or changes widely accepted scholarly interpretations in the field. If no book submitted for the prize meets this criterion, the award shall be given for "the best" book in U.S. women's and/or gender history. "The best" book recognizes the ideas and originality of the significant historical scholarship being done by historians of U.S. Women's and/or Gender History and makes a significant contribution to the understanding of U.S. Women's and/or Gender History. Click Organization of American Historians for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2024  Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South by Alejandra Dubcovsky
2023  Fierce and fearless : Patsy Takemoto Mink, first woman of color in Congress by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink
2022  Reckoning with slavery : gender, kinship, and capitalism in the early Black Atlantic by Jennifer L. Morgan
2021  The women's fight : the Civil War's battles for home, freedom, and nation by Thavolia Glymph
2020  Wayward lives, beautiful experiments : riotous black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals by Saidiya Hartman; Feminism for the Americas : the making of an international human rights movement by Katherine M. Marino (honorable mention)
2019  Sister saints : Mormon women since the end of polygamy by Colleen McDannell
2018  Bound in wedlock : slave and free Black marriage in the nineteenth century by Tera W. Hunter; Black on both sides : a racial history of trans identity by C. Riley Snorton (honorable mention)
2017  Equality on trial : gender and rights in the modern American workplace by Katherine Turk
2016  Founding friendships : friendships between men and women in the early American republic by Cassandra Alexis Good
2015  The myth of Seneca Falls : memory and the women's suffrage movement, 1848–1898 by Lisa Marguerite Tetrault

James A. Rawley Prize
The James A. Rawley Prize is awarded annually for a book dealing with the history of race relations in the United States. Click Organization of American Historians for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2024  The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Kevin Kenny
2023  Seeing red : indigenous land, American expansion, and the political economy of plunder in North America by Michael Witgen
2022  The bonds of inequality : debt and the making of the American city by Destin Jenkins
2021  Tacky's revolt : the story of an Atlantic slave war by Vincent Brown; Franchise : the golden arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain
2020  Race for profit : how banks and the real estate industry undermined black home ownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
2019  The new Negro : the life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart
2018  City of inmates : conquest, rebellion, and the rise of human caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 by Kelly Lytle Hernández; Dawn of Detroit : a chronicle of slavery and freedom in the City of the Straits by Tiya Miles
2017  The common cause : creating race and nation in the American Revolution by Robert G. Parkinson
2016  Brethren by nature : New England Indians, colonists, and the origins of American slavery by Margaret Ellen Newell
2015  Captive nation : Black prison organizing in the civil rights era by Daniel Berger
2014  The contested murder of Latasha Harlins : justice, gender, and the origins of the L. A. riots by Brenda E. Stevenson
2013  Somebody's children : the politics of transracial and transnational adoption by Laura Briggs
2012  No man's land : Jamaican guestworkers in America and the global history of deportable labor by Cindy Hahamovitch
2011  Racial propositions : ballot initiatives and the making of postwar California by Daniel Martinez HoSang
2010  The canal builders : making America's empire at the Panama Canal by Julie Greene
2009  The reaper's garden : death and power in the world of Atlantic slavery by Vincent Brown
2008  Becoming free in the cotton south by Susan Eva O'Donovan
2007  The blood of government : race, empire, the United States, and the Philippines by Paul A. Kramer
2006  The Black Arts Movement : literary nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s by James Edward Smethurst
2005  American Babylon : race and the struggle for postwar Oakland by Robert O. Self
2004  Ella Baker and the Black freedom movement : a radical democratic vision by Barbara Ransby
2003  Working cures : healing, health, and power on southern slave plantations by Sharla M. Fett; Stories of freedom in Black New York by Shane White
2002  Deep Souths : Delta, Piedmont and Sea Island society in the age of segregation by J. William Harris; Race and reunion : the Civil War in American memory by David W. Blight
2001  Reimagining Indians : Native Americans through Anglo eyes, 1880-1940 by Sherry L. Smith
2000  Radio Free Dixie : Robert F. Williams and the roots of Black Power by Timothy B. Tyson
1999  Just my soul responding : rhythm and blues, Black consciousness, and race relations by Brian Ward
1998  Contempt and pity : social policy and the image of the damaged Black psyche, 1880-1996 by Daryl Michael Scott
1997  Gender and Jim Crow : women and the politics of white supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore
1996  Reconstructing the household : families, sex, and the law in the nineteenth-century South by Peter W. Bardaglio
1995  Behind the mask of chivalry : the making of the second Ku Klux Klan by Nancy MacLean
1994  Southern labor and Black civil rights : organizing Memphis workers by Michael K. Honey
1993  The promise of the New South : life after Reconstruction by Edward L. Ayers
1992  The middle ground : Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650-1815 by Richard White; When Jesus came, the corn mothers went away : marriage, sexuality, and power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 by Ramón A. Gutiérrez
1991  Thrown among strangers : the making of Mexican culture in Frontier California by Douglas Monroy
1990  Belonging to America : equal citizenship and the constitution by Kenneth L. Karst

Frederick Jackson Turner Award
The Frederick Jackson Turner Award, first given in 1959 as the Prize Studies Award of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, has been given each year by the Organization of American Historians for an author's first book on some significant phase of American history and also to the press that submits and publishes it. Click Organization of American Historians for more information about the sponsor of this award.

2024  Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic by Michael A. Blaakman
2023  Necropolis : disease, power, and capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom by Kathryn Olivarius
2022  The next shift : the fall of industry and the rise of health care in rust belt America by Gabriel Winant
2021  The Young Lords : a radical history by Johanna Fernández; Wicked flesh : black women, intimacy, and freedom in the Atlantic world by Jessica Marie Johnson (honorable mention)
2020  Crying the news : a history of America's newsboys by Vincent DiGirolamo
2019  Mothers of massive resistance : white women and the politics of white supremacy by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae; Finalist: The second creation : fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era by Jonathan Gienapp; Finalist: The injustice never leaves you : anti-Mexican violence in Texas by Monica Muñoz Martinez; Finalist: Undocumented lives : the untold story of Mexican migration by Ana Raquel Minian
2018  Landscapes of hope : nature and the Great Migration in Chicago by Brian McCammack; The profit of the earth : the global ​seeds of American agriculture by Courtney Fullilove (honorable mention); Getting tough : welfare and imprisonment in 1970s America by Julilly Kohler-Hausmann (honorable mention)
2017  Blue Texas : the making of a multiracial Democratic coalition in the Civil Rights Era by Max Krochmal
2016  Pirate nests and the rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 by Mark G. Hanna
2015  A chosen exile : a history of racial passing in American life by Allyson Hobbs; The open mind : Cold War politics and the sciences of human nature by Jamie Cohen-Cole (honorable mention); Race horse men : how slavery and freedom were made at the racetrack by Katherine C. Mooney (honorable mention); Moral minorities and the making of American democracy by Kyle G. Volk (honorable mention)
2014  Standing on common ground : the making of a Sunbelt borderland by Geraldo L. Cadava; Little Manila is in the heart : the making of the Filipina/o American community in Stockton, California by Dawn Bohulano Mabalon (honorable mention)
2013  Freaks of fortune : the emerging world of capitalism and risk in America by Jonathan Levy
2012  The myth of American religious freedom by David Sehat; The warfare state : World War II Americans and the age of big government by James T. Sparrow (honorable mention)
2011  At the dark end of the street : black women, rape, and resistance–a new history of the civil rights movement from Rosa Parks to the rise of black power by Danielle L. McGuire; The color of America has changed : how racial diversity shaped civil rights reform in California, 1941-1978 by Mark Brilliant (honorable mention); Texas tough : the rise of America's prison empire by Robert Perkinson; Slavery in Indian country : the changing face of captivity in early America by Christina Snyder (honorable mention)
2010  To serve God and Wal-Mart : the making of Christian free enterprise by Bethany Moreton; Alien neighbors, foreign friends : Asian Americans, housing, and the transformation of urban California by Charlotte Brooks (honorable mention); The oyster question : scientists, watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay since 1880 by Christine Keiner (honorable mention); A movement without marches : African American women and the politics of poverty in postwar Philadelphia by Lisa Levenstein (honorable mention)
2009  Upbuilding Black Durham : gender, class, and Black community development in the Jim Crow South by Leslie Brown
2008  The populist vision by Charles Postel
2007  Violence over the land : Indians and empires in the early American West by Ned Blackhawk; The Humboldt current : nineteenth-century exploration and the roots of American environmentalism by Aaron Sachs (honorable mention)
2006  Ties that bind : the story of an Afro-Cherokee family in slavery and freedom by Tiya Alicia Miles; Between two empires : race, history, and transnationalism in Japanese America by Eiichiro Azuma (honorable mention)
2005  Impossible subjects : illegal aliens and the making of modern America by Mae M. Ngai
2004  White on arrival :  Italians, race, color, and power in Chicago, 1890-1945 by Thomas A. Guglielmo
2003  Captives & cousins : slavery, kinship, and community in the Southwest borderlands by James F. Brooks
2002  The bulldozer in the countryside : suburban sprawl and the rise of American environmentalism by Adam Rome
2001  Captain Ahab had a wife : New England women & the whalefishery, 1720-1870 by Lisa Norling
2000  Radio Free Dixie : Robert F. Williams and the roots of Black power by Timothy B. Tyson; 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  The white scourge : Mexicans, Blacks, and poor whites in Texas cotton culture by Neil Foley
1997  Gender and Jim Crow : women and the politics of white supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore
1996  Songs of Zion : the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa by James T. Campbell
1995  Gay New York : gender, urban culture, and the makings of the gay male world, 1890-1940 by George Chauncey
1994  Common labour : workers and the digging of North American canals, 1780-1860 by Peter Way
1993  The ordeal of the longhouse : the peoples of the Iroquois League in the era of European colonization by Daniel K. Richter
1992  When Jesus came, the Corn Mothers went away : marriage, sexuality, and power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 by Rámon A. Gutiérrez
1991  The roots of rural capitalism : western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 by Christopher F. Clark
1990  The Indians' new world : Catawbas and their neighbors from European contact through the era of removal by James H. Merrell
1989  Workers on the waterfront : seamen, longshoremen, and unionism in the 1930s by Bruce Nelson
1988  Anglos and Mexicans in the making of Texas, 1836-1986 by David Montejano
1987  Out of work : the first century of unemployment in Massachusetts by Alexander Keyssar
1986  Redneck liberal : Theodore G. Bilbo and the New Deal by Chester M. Morgan
1985  The wool-hat boys : Georgia's Populist Party by Barton C. Shaw; Chants democratic : New York City & the rise of the American working class, 1788-1850 by Sean Wilentz
1984  The roots of southern populism : yeoman farmers and the transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 by Steven Hahn
1983  Beyond separate spheres : the intellectual roots of modern feminism by Rosalind Rosenberg
1982  In struggle : SNCC and the Black awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson
1981  Henry Cabot Lodge and the search for an American foreign policy by William C. Widenor
1980  Women and men on the overland trail by John Mack Farragher
1979  Peter Finley Dunne and Mr. Dooley : the Chicago years by Charles F. Fanning, Jr.
1978  The work ethic in industrial America, 1850-1920 by Daniel T. Rodgers
1977  Harpers Ferry armory and the new technology : the challenge of change by Merritt Roe Smith
1976  No award given
1975  No award given
1974  Toward an urban vision : ideas and institutions in nineteenth-century America by Thomas H. Bender
1973  Advocacy & objectivity : a crisis in the professionalization of American social science, 1865-1905 by Mary O. Furner
1972  The crisis of democratic theory; scientific naturalism & the problem of value by Edward A. Purcell, Jr.
1971  The citizen soldiers; the Plattsburg training camp movement, 1913-1920 by John Garry Clifford
1970  The politics of fear : Joseph McCarthy and the Senate by Robert Griffith (2d ed., 1987, here)
1969  Walter Hines Page; ambassador to the Court of St. James's by Ross Gregory
1968  No award given
1967  Radicalism & reform; the Vrooman family and American social thought, 1837-1937 by Ross E. Paulson
1966  Congressional conservatism and the New Deal; the growth of the conservative coalition in Congress, 1933-1939 by James T. Patterson
1965  Erie water west; a history of the Erie Canal, 1792-1854 by Ronald E. Shaw
1964  No award given
1963  No award given
1962  The challenge to American freedoms; World War I and the rise of the American Civil Liberties Union by Donald O. Johnson
1961  The Mexican revolution, 1914-1915; the Convention of Aguascalientes by Robert E. Quirk
1960  No award given
1959  The idea of continental union; agitation for the annexation of Canada to the United States, 1849-1893 by Donald F. Warner