The Robert G. Athearn Award
An award for the best book on the twentieth-century West. Click Western History Association for more information about the sponsors of this award.
2022 Brewing a boycott : how a grassroots coalition fought Coors and remade American consumer activism by Allyson P. Brantley
2021 Writing Kit Carson : fallen heroes in a changing West by Susan Lee Johnson
2020 Reclaiming the reservation : histories of Indian sovereignty suppressed and renewed by Alexandra Harmon
2019 The injustice never leaves you : anti-Mexican violence in Texas by Monica Muñoz Martinez
2018 City of inmates : conquest, rebellion, and the rise of human caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 by Kelly Lytle Hernández
2017 Three roads to Magdalena : coming of age in a Southwest borderland, 1890-1990 by David Wallace Adams
2016 City Indian : Native American activism in Chicago, 1893-1934 by Rosalyn LaPier and David R.M. Beck
2015 No award
2014 Plutopia : nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters by Kate Brown
2012 Shadow tribe : the making of Columbia River Indian identity by Andrew H. Fisher
2010 White mother to a dark race : settler colonialism, maternalism, and the removal of indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 by Margaret Jacobs
2008 From all points : America's immigrant West, 1870s-1952 by Elliot R. Barkan
2006 Democratizing the enemy : the Japanese American internment by Brian Masaru Hayashi
2004 Public lands and political meaning : ranchers, the government, and the property between them by Karen Merrill
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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