Subject Guide: History

The Caughey-Western History Association Prize
An award for the best book of the year in Western history. Click Western History Association for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2024  Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion by Elliott West.
2023  Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America by Michael J. Witgen
2022  The settler sea : California's Salton Sea and the consequences of colonialism by Traci Brynne Voyles
2021  South to freedom : runaway slaves to Mexico and the road to the Civil War by Alice Baumgartner
2020  These people have always been a republic : indigenous electorates in the U. S.-Mexico borderlands, 1598-1912 by Maurice Crandall
2019  The injustice never leaves you : anti-Mexican violence in Texas by Monica Muñoz Martinez
2018  God's red son : the Ghost Dance religion and the making of modern America by Louis Warren
2017  Mesa of sorrows: a history of the Awat'ovi massacre by James F. Brooks
2016  Strangers on familiar soil : rediscovering the Chile-California connection by Edward Dallam Melillo; The sea is my country : the maritime world of the Makahs by Joshua Reid
2015  Power lines : Phoenix and the making of the modern Southwest by Andrew Needham
2014  Beyond Pontiac's shadow : Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763 by Keith R. Widder
2013  This Indian country : American Indian political activists and the place they made by Frederick E. Hoxie
2012  Empires, nations, and families : a history of the North American West, 1800-1860 by Anne F. Hyde
2011  Angel Island : immigrant gateway to America by Erika Lee and Judy Yung
2010  The last Indian war : the Nez Perce story by Elliott West
2009  The Comanche empire by Pekka Hämäläinen
2008  Charles M. Russell : a catalogue raisonné by B. Byron Price
2007  John Sutter : a life on the North American frontier by Albert L. Hurtado
2006  Buffalo Bill's America : William Cody and the Wild West Show by Louis Warren
2005  The Plains Sioux and U.S. colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee by Jeffrey Ostler
2004  One vast winter count : the Native American West before Lewis and Clark by Colin G. Calloway
2003  Blood of the prophets : Brigham Young and the massacre at Mountain Meadows by Will Bagley

The John C. Ewers Award
An award for the best book on the topic of North American Indian ethnohistory. Click Western History Association for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2024  The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South by Elizabeth Ellis
2023  We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California by Martin Rizzo-Martinez
2022  I have been here all the while : Black freedom on Native land by Alaina E. Roberts; and  We are the land : a history of Native California by Damon B. Akins and William Bauer
2021  Native hoops : the rise of American Indian basketball, 1895-1970 by Wade Davies
2020  Reproduction on the reservation : pregnancy, childbirth, and colonialism in the long twentieth century by Brianna Theobald
2018  Invisible reality : storytellers, storytakers, and the supernatural world of the Blackfeet by Rosalyn R. LaPier
2017  The world and all the things upon it : native Hawaiian geographies of exploration by David A. Chang.
2016  The sea is my country : the maritime world of the Makahs, an indigenous borderlands people by Joshua Reid
2014  Dispersed but not destroyed : a history of the seventeenth-century Wendat people by Kathryn Magee Labelle
2012  Slavery in Indian country : the changing face of captivity in early America by Christina Snyder
2010  The Comanche empire by Pekka Hämäläinen
2008  Violence over the land : Indians and empires in the early American West by Ned Blackhawk
2006  Indians in unexpected places by Philip Deloria
2004  One vast winter count : the Native American West before Lewis and Clark by Colin G. Calloway

Donald L. Fixico Award
An award that recognizes innovative work in the field of American Indian and Canadian First Nations History. Click Western History Association for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2024  The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South by Elizabeth Ellis
2023  A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast by Charlotte Coté
2022  Returning home : Diné creative works from the Intermountain Indian School by Farina King, Michael P. Taylor, and James R. Swensen
2021  A sacred people : indigenous governance, traditional leadership, and the warriors of the Cheyenne nation and A sovereign people : indigenous nationhood, traditional law, and the covenants of the Cheyenne nation by Leo Killsback
2020  Becoming Mary Sully : toward an American Indian abstract by Philip J. Deloria
2019  Our beloved kin : a new history of King Philip's War by Lisa Brooks
2018  Invisible reality : storytellers, storytakers, and the supernatural world of the Blackfeet by Rosalyn R. LaPier

W. Turrentine Jackson Award
An award for a first published book on the American West. Click Western History Association for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2024  Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent by John William Nelson
2023  The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana by Mark T. Johnson
2022  I have been here all the while : Black freedom on Native land by Alaina E. Roberts; and Country of the cursed and the driven : slavery and the Texas borderlands by Paul Barba
2021  Tiny you : a western history of the anti-abortion movement by Jennifer Holland
2020  Floating coast : an environmental history of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth
2019  The global interior : mineral frontiers and American power by Megan Black
2018  The INS on the line : making immigration law on the US-Mexico border, 1917-1954 by S. Deborah Kang
2017  Houston bound : culture and color in a Jim Crow city by Tyina Steptoe|
2015  The settlers' empire : colonialism and state formation in America's Old Northwest by Bethel Saler
2013  The elusive West and the contest for empire, 1713-1763 by Paul W. Mapp
2011  Indian blues : American Indians and the politics of music, 1879-1934 by Jon Troutman
2009  War of a thousand deserts : Indian raids and the U.S.-Mexican War by Brian DeLay
2007  Children of coyote, missionaries of Saint Francis : Indian-Spanish relations in colonial California, 1769-1850 by Steven W. Hackel
2005  Vicious : wolves and men in America by John T. Coleman
2003  Captives & cousins : slavery, kinship, and community in the Southwest borderlands by James F. Brooks
2001  Roaring camp : the social world of the California Gold Rush by Susan Lee Johnson
1999  Gamblers and dreamers : women, men, and community in the Klondike by Charlene Porsild
1997  Walls and mirrors : Mexican Americans, Mexican immigrants and the politics of ethnicity by David Gutierrez
1995  Purchasing power : consumer organizing, gender, and the Seattle labor movement, 1919-1929 by Dana Frank
1993  The trans-Alaska pipeline controversy : technology, conservation, and the frontier by Peter Coates
1991  An American vision : Far Western landscape and national culture, 1820-1920 by Anne Farrar Hyde
1989  Hoover Dam : an American adventure by Joseph E. Stevens
1987  After the West was won : homesteaders and town-builders in western South Dakota, 1900-1917 by Paula M. Nelson

Joan Paterson Kerr Award
An award for the best illustrated book on the American West. Click Western History Association for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2024  Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism by J. R. Henneman 
2023  Montana Modernists: Shifting Perceptions of Western Art by Michele Corriel
2022  The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre : a photographic history by Karlos K. Hill
2021  Through a native lens : American Indian photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman
2020  Warhol and the West by Heather Ahtone, Faith Brower, and Seth Hopkins
2019  In a rugged land : Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and the Three Mormon towns collaboration, 1953-1954 by James R. Swensen
2018  Lakota performers in Europe : their culture and the artifacts they left behind by Steve Friesen
2017  Branding the American West : paintings and films, 1900-1950, edited by Marian Wardle and Sarah E. Boehme
2015  A Russian American photographer in Tlingit country : Vincent Soboleff in Alaska by Sergei Kan
2013  Colors of confinement : rare Kodachrome photographs of Japanese American incarceration in World War II by Eric L. Muller
2011  Charles Deas and 1840s America by Carol Clark
2009  Charles M. Russell : a catalogue raisonné by B. Byron Price
2007  A Northern Cheyenne album, photographs by Thomas B. Marquis, edited by Dr. Margot Liberty ; commentary by John Woodenlegs
2005  Karl Bodmer's North American prints, edited by Brandon K. Ruud ; annotations by Marsha V. Gallagher ; essays by Ron Tyler & Brandon K. Ruud ; foreword by J. Brooks Joyner
2003  Looking both ways : heritage and identity of the Alutiiq people, edited by Aron L. Crowell, Amy F. Steffian, and Gordon L. Pullar
2001  Long day's journey : the steamboat & stagecoach era in the northern West by Carlos Schwantes
1999  Yellowstone and the biology of time by Mary Meagher and Douglas B. Houston
1997  Frederic Remington : a catalogue raisonné of paintings, watercolors and drawings by Peter Hassrick and Melissa J. Webster
1995  Eadweard Muybridge and the photographic panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880, edited by David Harris with Eric Sandweiss
1993  Art of the American Indian frontier : The Chandler-Pohrt collection by David W. Penny

Sally and Ken Owens Award
An award for the best book on the history of the Pacific West, including Alaska, Hawaii, Western Canada, and the U.S. Pacific Territories. Click Western History Association for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2024  Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America by Adrian De Leon
2023  An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin: Disability and Life-Making during Medical Incarceration by Adria L. Imada
2022  Space-time colonialism : Alaska's indigenous and Asian entanglements by Juliana Hu Pegues
2021  The port of missing men : Billy Gohl, labor, and brutal times in the Pacific Northwest by Aaron Goings
2020  Collisions at the crossroads : how place and mobility make race by Genevieve Carpio
2019  The Chinese must go : violence, exclusion, and the making of the alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams
2018  Hawaiian by birth : missionary children, bicultural identity, and U.S. colonialism in the Pacific by Joy Schulz
2017  Kika kila : how the Hawaiian steel guitar changed the sound of modern music by John W. Troutman
2016  The sea is my country : the maritime world of the Makahs by Joshua Reid
2015  No award
2014  The great ocean : Pacific worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush by David Igler

Hal K. Rothman Award
An award for the best book in western environmental history. Click Western History Association for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2024  Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers by Amy Kohout
2023  People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America by Robert Michael Morrissey
2022  Defending the Arctic Refuge : a photographer, an indigenous nation, and a fight for environmental justice by Finis Dunaway
2021  An open pit visible from the moon : the Wilderness Act and the fight to protect Miners Ridge and the public interest by Adam Sowards
2020  Floating coast : an environmental history of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth
2019  The Chisholm Trail : Joseph McCoy's great gamble by James E. Sherow
2018  Heading out : a history of American camping by Terence Young
2017  The city is more than human : an animal history of Seattle by Frederick Brown
2015  Power lines : Phoenix and the making of the modern southwest by Andrew Needham
2013  The nature of borders : salmon, boundaries, and bandits on the Salish Sea by Lissa K. Wadewitz
2012  Finding oil : the nature of petroleum geology, 1859-1920 by Brian Frehner
2011  Dreaming of sheep in Navajo Country by Marsha Weisiger
2009  The country in the city : the greening of the San Francisco Bay area by Richard A. Walker
2007  The battle over Hetch Hetchy : America's most controversial dam and the birth of modern environmentalism by Robert Righter

Dwight L. Smith (ABC-CLIO) Award
An award for a bibliographic or research work. Click Western History Association for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2024  The Collected Writings of Sherman and Grace Coolidge by Tadeusz Lewandowski
2023  Slavery in Zion: A Documentary and Genealogical History of Black Lives and Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847-1862 by Amy Tanner Thiriot,  |and|  The Dakota Way of Life by Ella Cara Deloria edited by Thierry Veyrié
2022  Inside the Texas Revolution : the enigmatic memoir of Herman Ehrenberg, edited by James E. Crisp
2021  Billy the Kid : a reader's guide by Richard Etulain
2019  Bending their way onward : Creek Indian removal in documents, edited by Christopher D. Haveman
2018  A fur trader on the Upper Missouri : the journal and description of Jean-Baptiste Truteau, 1794-1796, edited by Raymond J. DeMallie, Douglas R. Parks, & Robert Vezina
2016  Encounters with the People : written and oral accounts of Nez Perce life to 1858 by Dennis Baird, Diane Mallickan, and W. R. Swagerty
2014  Witness : a Húnkpapȟa historian's strong-heart song of the Lakotas by Josephine Waggoner ; edited and with an introduction by Emily Levine
2012  Pablo Tac, indigenous scholar : writing on Luseno language and colonial history, c. 1840 by Lisbeth Haas
2010  The North American journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied : volume 1, May 1832-April 1833, edited by Stephen S. Witte & Marsha V. Gallagher ; translated by William J. Orr, Paul Schach & Dieter Karch
2008  John Caspar Wild : painter and printmaker of nineteenth-century urban America by John W. Reps
2006  The Hill Collection of Pacific Voyages at the University of California San Diego by Lynda Claassen and the Mandeville Special Collections Library (for more information, see this)
2004  The Indian Reorganization Act : congresses and bills, edited by Vine Deloria, Jr.

Robert M. Utley Award
An award for the best book on military history of the frontier and western North America. Click Western History Association for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2024  Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers by Amy Kohout |and| The Forgotten Diaspora: Mesoamerican Migrations and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Travis Jeffres
2023  Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández
2022  The Apache diaspora : four centuries of displacement and survival by Paul Conrad
2021  How the South won the Civil War : oligarchy, democracy, and the continuing fight for the soul of America by Heather Cox Richardson
2020  Lakota America : a new history of indigenous power by Pekka Hämäläinen
2019  A bad peace and a good war : Spain and the Mescalero Apache uprising of 1795-1799 by Mark Santiago
2018  The dead march : a history of the Mexican American War by Peter Guardino
2017  Surviving Wounded Knee : the Lakotas and the politics of memory by David W. Grua.
2016  Masters of empire : Great Lakes Indians and the making of North America by Michael McDonnell
2015  Remembering the Modoc War : redemptive violence and the making of American innocence by Boyd Cothran
2014  A misplaced massacre : struggling over the memory of Sand Creek by Ari Kelman
2013  A wicked war : Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. invasion of Mexico by Amy S. Greenberg
2012  No award given
2011  Hancock's war : conflict on the southern plains by William Chalfant
2010  The American military frontiers : the United States Army in the West, 1783-1900 by Robert Wooster
2009  War of a thousand deserts : Indian raids and the U.S.-Mexican War by Brian DeLay
2008  Gall : Lakota war chief by Robert W. Larson
2007  Violence over the land : Indians and empires in the early American West by Ned Blackhawk
2006  Mickey Free : Apache captive, interpreter, and Indian scout by R. Allen Radbourne
2005  Blue Water Creek and the first Sioux War, 1854-1856 by R. Eli Paul
2004  Morning Star dawn : the Powder River expedition and the Northern Cheyennes, 1876 by Jerome A. Greene
2003  The Black regulars, 1866-1898 by William A. Dobak and Thomas D. Phillips

David J. Weber Prize
A prize given annually for the best non-fiction book on Southwestern America. Click Western History Association for more information about the sponsors of this award.

2024  The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands by Victor M. Valle 
2023  A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community by Natalia Molina
2022  Country of the cursed and the driven : slavery and the Texas Borderlands by Paul Barba
2021  Tiny you : a western history of the anti-abortion movement by Jennifer Holland
2020  These people have always been a republic : indigenous electorates in the U. S.-Mexico borderlands, 1598-1912 by Maurice Crandall
2019  Hopi runners : crossing the terrain between Indian and American by Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert
2018  Porous borders : multiracial migrations and the law in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by Julian Lim
2017  Three roads to Magdalena : coming of age in a Southwest borderland, 1890-1990 by David Wallace Adams
2016  Seeds of empire : cotton, slavery, and the transformation of the Texas borderlands, 1800-1850 by Andrew Torget
2015  Power lines : Phoenix and the making of the modern Southwest by Andrew Needham
2013  Chiricahua and Janos : communities of violence in the southwestern borderlands, 1680-1880 by Lance R. Blyth
2012  A great aridness : climate change and the future of the American southwest by William deBuys