| Year |
Author(s) |
Book |
Award |
| 1962 |
Theodore H. White |
The Making of the President 1960 |
Winner |
| 1963 |
Barbara W. Tuchman |
The Guns of August |
Winner |
| 1964 |
Richard Hofstadter |
Anti-intellectualism in American Life |
Winner |
| 1965 |
Howard Mumford Jones |
O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years |
Winner |
| 1966 |
Edwin Way Teale |
Wandering Through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey Through the North American Winter |
Winner |
| 1967 |
David Brion Davis |
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture |
Winner |
| 1968 |
Will Durant and Ariel Durant |
The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution |
Winner |
| 1969 |
René Jules Dubos |
So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events |
Winner |
| Norman Mailer |
The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History |
Winner |
| 1970 |
Erik H. Erikson |
Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence |
Winner |
| 1971 |
John Toland |
The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 |
Winner |
| 1972 |
Barbara W. Tuchman |
Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 |
Winner |
| 1973 |
Robert Coles |
Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III |
Winner |
| Frances FitzGerald |
Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam |
Winner |
| 1974 |
Ernest Becker |
The Denial of Death |
Winner |
| 1975 |
Annie Dillard |
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek |
Winner |
| 1976 |
Robert N. Butler |
Why Survive? Being Old in America |
Winner |
| 1977 |
William W. Warner |
Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay |
Winner |
| 1978 |
Carl Sagan |
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence |
Winner |
| 1979 |
Edward O. Wilson |
On Human Nature |
Winner |
| 1980 |
Douglas R. Hofstadter |
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid |
Winner |
| Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar |
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination |
Finalist |
| Lewis Thomas |
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher |
Finalist |
| 1981 |
Carl E. Schorske |
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture |
Winner |
| Maxine Hong Kingston |
China Men |
Finalist |
| William Manchester |
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War |
Finalist |
| Marshall Frady |
Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey |
Finalist |
| 1982 |
Tracy Kidder |
The Soul of a New Machine |
Winner |
| John McPhee |
Basin and Range |
Finalist |
| Diana Trilling |
Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor |
Finalist |
| 1983 |
Susan Sheehan |
Is There No Place on Earth for Me? |
Winner |
| Diane Johnson |
Terrorists and Novelists |
Finalist |
| Jonathan Schell |
The Fate of the Earth |
Finalist |
| 1984 |
Paul Starr |
The Social Transformation of American Medicine |
Winner |
| Winston Groom and Duncan Spencer |
Conversations with the Enemy |
Finalist |
| Susan Jacoby |
Wild Justice |
Finalist |
| 1985 |
Studs Terkel |
The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two |
Winner |
| Donald Keene |
Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era |
Finalist |
| Jonathan Kwitny |
Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World |
Finalist |
| 1986 |
J. Anthony Lukas |
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families |
Winner |
| Joseph Lelyveld |
Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White |
Winner |
| Robert N. Bellah |
Habits and the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life |
Finalist |
| 1987 |
David K. Shipler |
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land |
Winner |
| Cyra McFadden |
Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir |
Finalist |
| John McPhee |
Rising from the Plains |
Finalist |
| 1988 |
Richard Rhodes |
The Making of the Atomic Bomb |
Winner |
| James Gleick |
Chaos: Making a New Science |
Finalist |
| Daniel Callahan |
Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society |
Finalist |
| 1989 |
Neil Sheehan |
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam |
Winner |
| Timothy Ferris |
Coming of Age in the Milky Way |
Finalist |
| McGeorge Bundy |
Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years |
Finalist |
| Howard Kohn |
The Last Farmer |
Finalist |
| 1990 |
Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson |
And Their Children After Them |
Winner |
| David Fromkin |
A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 |
Finalist |
| Stephen Jay Gould |
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History |
Finalist |
| 1991 |
Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson |
The Ants |
Winner |
| John McPhee |
Looking for a Ship |
Finalist |
| William duBuys and Alex Harris |
River of Traps: A Village Life |
Finalist |
| 1992 |
Daniel Yergin |
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power |
Winner |
| Andre Dubus |
Broken Vessels |
Finalist |
| Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall |
Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics |
Finalist |
| 1993 |
Garry Wills |
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America |
Winner |
| Susan Griffin |
A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War |
Finalist |
| Richard Rodriguez |
Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father |
Finalist |
| Anne Matthews |
Where the Buffalo Roam: Restoring America's Great Plains |
Finalist |
| 1994 |
David Remnick |
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire |
Winner |
| Peter Gay |
The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud |
Finalist |
| John Lukacs |
The End of the Twentieth Century: And the End of the Modern Age |
Finalist |
| 1995 |
Jonathan Weiner |
The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time |
Winner |
| Sherwin B. Nuland |
How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter |
Finalist |
| John Berendt |
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story |
Finalist |
| 1996 |
Tina Rosenberg |
The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism |
Winner |
| Daniel C. Dennett |
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and The Meanings of Life |
Finalist |
| Lawrence Weschler |
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology |
Finalist |
| 1997 |
Richard Kluger |
Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris |
Winner |
| Cynthia Ozick |
Fame and Folly |
Finalist |
| Samuel G. Freedman |
The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond |
Finalist |
| 1998 |
Jared Diamond |
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies |
Winner |
| Steven Pinker |
How the Mind Works |
Finalist |
| Jon Krakauer |
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster |
Finalist |
| 1999 |
John McPhee |
Annals of the Former World |
Winner |
| Elliott Currie |
Crime and Punishment in America |
Finalist |
| Judith Rich Harris |
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do |
Finalist |
| 2000 |
John W. Dower |
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II |
Winner |
| Scott Weidensaul |
Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds |
Finalist |
| Brian Greene |
The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory |
Finalist |
| 2001 |
Herbert P. Bix |
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan |
Winner |
| Dave Eggers |
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius |
Finalist |
| Ted Conover |
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing |
Finalist |
| 2002 |
Diane McWhorter |
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution |
Winner |
| Andrew Solomon |
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression |
Finalist |
| David Halberstam |
War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals |
Finalist |
| 2003 |
Samantha Power |
"A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide |
Winner |
| Ellen Meloy |
The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit |
Finalist |
| Steven Pinker |
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature |
Finalist |
| 2004 |
Anne Applebaum |
Gulag: A History |
Winner |
| Steven Nadler |
Rembrandt's Jews |
Finalist |
| Dana Priest |
The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military |
Finalist |
| 2005 |
Steve Coll |
Ghost Wars |
Winner |
| Suketu Mehta |
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found |
Finalist |
| Luis Alberto Urrea |
The Devil's Highway: A True Story |
Finalist |
| 2006 |
Caroline Elkins |
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya |
Winner |
| Tony Judt |
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 |
Finalist |
| George Packer |
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq |
Finalist |
| 2007 |
Lawrence Wright |
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 |
Winner |
| Pete Earley |
Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness |
Finalist |
| Thomas E. Ricks |
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq |
Finalist |
| 2008 |
Saul Friedländer |
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 |
Winner |
| Allan Brandt |
The Cigarette Century |
Finalist |
| Alex Ross |
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century |
Finalist |
| 2009 |
Douglas A. Blackmon |
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II |
Winner |
| Arthur Herman |
Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age |
Finalist |
| William I. Hitchcock |
The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe |
Finalist |
| 2010 |
David E. Hoffman |
The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy |
Winner |
| John Cassidy |
How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities |
Finalist |
| Robert Wright |
The Evolution of God |
Finalist |
| 2011 |
Siddhartha Mukherjee |
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer |
Winner |
| S.C. Gwynne |
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History |
Finalist |
| Nicholas G. Carr |
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains |
Finalist |
| 2012 |
Stephen Greenblatt |
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern |
Winner |
| Diane Ackerman |
One Hundred Names For Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing |
Finalist |
| Mara Hvistendahl |
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men |
Finalist |
| 2013 |
Gilbert King |
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America |
Winner |
| Katherine Boo |
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity |
Finalist |
| David George Haskell |
The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature |
Finalist |
| 2014 |
Dan Fagin |
Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation |
Winner |
| Gary J. Bass |
The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide |
Finalist |
| Fred Kaplan |
The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War |
Finalist |
| 2015 |
Elizabeth Kolbert |
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History |
Winner |
| Evan Osnos |
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China |
Finalist |
| Anand Gopal |
No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes |
Finalist |
| 2016 |
Joby Warrick |
Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS |
Winner |
| Ta-Nehisi Coates |
Between the World and Me |
Finalist |
| Carla Power |
If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran |
Finalist |
| 2017 |
Matthew Desmond |
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City |
Winner |
| John Donvan and Caren Zucker |
In a Different Key: The Story of Autism |
Finalist |
| Micki McElya |
The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery |
Finalist |
| 2018 |
James Forman Jr. |
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America |
Winner |
| Suzy Hansen |
Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-America World |
Finalist |
| Richard O. Prum |
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us |
Finalist |
| 2019 |
Eliza Griswold |
Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America |
Winner |
| Bernice Yeung |
In a Day's Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America's Most Vulnerable Workers |
Finalist |
| Elizabeth Rush |
Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore |
Finalist |
| 2020 |
Greg Grandin |
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America |
Winner |
| Anne Boyer |
The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care |
Winner |
| Louise Aronson |
Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life |
Finalist |
| Albert Woodfox with Leslie George |
Solitary |
Finalist |
| 2021 |
David Zucchino |
Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy |
Winner |
| Cathy Park Hong |
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning |
Finalist |
| Sierra Crane Murdoch |
Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country |
Finalist |
| 2022 |
Andrea Elliott |
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City |
Winner |
| Carla Power |
Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism |
Finalist |
| Joshua Prager |
The Family Roe: An American Story |
Finalist |
| 2023 |
Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa |
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice |
Winner |
| Jing Tsu |
Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern |
Finalist |
| David George Haskell |
Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction |
Finalist |
| Linda Villarosa |
Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation |
Finalist |
| 2024 |
Nathan Thrall |
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy |
Winner |
| John Vaillant |
Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World |
Finalist |
| Siddharth Kara |
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives |
Finalist |
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