| 2025 | Winner | Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery | Seth Rockman | University of Chicago Press |
| 2024 | Winner | Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights | Dylan C. Penningroth | Liveright |
| 2023 | Winner | Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Study of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas | Kirsten Silva Gruesz | Belknap Press |
| 2022 | Winner | American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation | Roberto Saba | Princeton University Press |
| 2021 | Winner | The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation | Thavolia Glymph | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2020 | Winner | American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865 | Jeremy Zallen | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2019 | Winner | Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism | Nan C. Enstad | University of Chicago Press |
| 2018 | Winner | Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive | Camilla Townsend | Oxford University Press |
| 2017 | Winner | The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration | David Chang | University of Minnesota Press |
| 2016 | Winner | Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies | Ann Twinam | Stanford University Press |
| 2015 | Winner | Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People | Elizabeth A. Fenn | Hill and Wang |
| 2015 | Winner | The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World | Greg Grandin | Metropolitan Books |
| 2014 | Winner | Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters | Kate Brown | Oxford University Press |
| 2013 | Winner | The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail | W. Jeffrey Bolster | Harvard University Press |
| 2012 | Winner | Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation | Jean M. Hébrard, Rebecca J. Scott | Harvard University Press |
| 2011 | Winner | Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition | Daniel Okrent | Scribner |
| 2010 | Winner | Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 | John McNeill | Cambridge University Press |
| 2009 | Winner | Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History | Karl Jacoby | Penguin Press |
| 2008 | Winner | The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles | Scott Kurashige | Princeton University Press |
| 2007 | Winner | The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America | Allan Brandt | Basic Books |
| 2006 | Winner | Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show | Louis Warren | Knopf |
| 2005 | Winner | Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War | Melvin Ely | Knopf |
| 2004 | Winner | In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 | Edward L. Ayers | W. W. Norton |
| 2003 | Winner | Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. | Ira Berlin | Belknap Press |
| 2002 | Winner | Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism, 1915-40 | Mary Renda | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2001 | Winner | The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States | Alexander Keyssar | Basic Books |
| 2000 | Winner | The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction | Linda Gordon | Harvard University Press |
| 1999 | Winner | The Life and Times of Pancho Villa | Friedrich Katz | Stanford University Press |
| 1998 | Winner | Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry | Philip D. Morgan | University of North Carolina Press |
| 1997 | Winner | Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in 18th-Century Mexico | William Taylor | Stanford University Press |
| 1996 | Winner | William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic | Alan Taylor | Knopf |
| 1995 | Winner | Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s | Ann Douglas | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1995 | Winner | Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England | Stephen Innes | W. W. Norton |
| 1994 | Winner | Providence Island, 1630-41: The Other Purian Colony | Karen Kupperman | Cambridge University Press |
| 1993 | Winner | The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, 16th through 18th Centuries | James Lockhart | Stanford University Press |
| 1992 | Winner | The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 | Richard White | Cambridge University Press |
| 1991 | Winner | Alabi’s World | Richard Price | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| 1990 | Winner | Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People | Jon Butler | Harvard University Press |
| 1989 | Winner | That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession | Peter Novick | Cambridge University Press |
| 1988 | Winner | Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World | Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, Christopher Daly | University of North Carolina Press |
| 1987 | Winner | Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-50 | Mary Karasch | Princeton University Press |
| 1986 | Winner | The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols | Alan Knight | Cambridge University Press |
| 1985 | Winner | Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival | Nancy Farriss | Princeton University Press |
| 1984 | Winner | Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 | Sean Wilentz | Oxford University Press |
| 1983 | Winner | Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 | Louis R. Harlan | Oxford University Press |
| 1982 | Winner | History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 | Walter Rodney | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| 1981 | Winner | The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain | Paul Clemens | Cornell University Press |
| 1980 | Winner | Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning | John Reps | Cornell University Press |
| 1979 | Winner | Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade | Calvin Martin | University of California Press |
| 1978 | Winner | The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Columbia, 1781 | John Phelan | University of Wisconsin Press |
| 1977 | Winner | The Enlightenment in America | Henry May | Oxford University Press |
| 1976 | Winner | American Slavery–American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia | Edmund Morgan | W. W. Norton |
| 1975 | Winner | The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1700-1823 | David Davis | Cornell University Press |
| 1974 | Winner | Black Majority | Peter Wood | Knopf |
| 1973 | Winner | Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1850 | Richard Slotkin | Wesleyan University Press |
| 1972 | Winner | The Best Poor Man’s Country | James Lemon | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| 1971 | Winner | Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States | Carl N. Degler | Macmillan |
| 1971 | Winner | The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic | David Rothman | Unknown |
| 1970 | Winner | Populism to Progressivism in Alabama | Sheldon Hackney | Princeton University Press |
| 1970 | Winner | Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America | Leonard Richards | Oxford University Press |
| 1969 | Winner | The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth | Sam Warner, Jr. | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1968 | Winner | The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter | Michael Rogin | MIT Press |
| 1966 | Winner | Reconstructing the Union: Conflict of Theory and Policy during the Civil War | Herman Belz | Cornell University Press |
| 1965 | Winner | The Discovery of Abundance | Daniel Fox | Cornell University Press |
| 1964 | Winner | The Eleventh Pillar: New York State and the Federal Constitution | Linda DePauw | Cornell University Press |
| 1962 | Winner | The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-98 | Walter LaFeber | Cornell University Press |
| 1961 | Winner | The United States and the First Hague Peace Conference | Calvin Davis | Cornell University Press |
| 1960 | Winner | The United States and Pancho Villa | C. Clarence Clendenen | Cornell University Press |
| 1960 | Winner | The Enterprise of a Free People: Canals and the Canal Fund in the New York Economy, 1792-1838 | Nathan Miller | Cornell University Press |
| 1959 | Winner | Free Conservative Crisis and the Rule of Law: Attitudes of Bar and Bench, 1887-95 | Arnold Paul | Cornell University Press |
| 1958 | Winner | Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program | Paul Conkin | Cornell University Press |
| 1957 | Winner | Rails, Mines, and Progress: Seven American Promoters in Mexico | David Pletcher | Cornell University Press |
| 1956 | Winner | The Axis Alliance and Japanese-American Relations, 1941 | Paul Schroeder | Cornell University Press |
| 1955 | Winner | Colonists from Scotland: Emigration to North America, 1707-83 | Ian Graham | Cornell University Press |
| 1954 | Winner | The Development of American Petroleum Pipelines: A Study in Enterprise and Public Policy | Arthur Johnson | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1953 | Winner | A History of the Freedman’s Bureau | George Bentley | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1952 | Winner | Robert Morris, Revolutionary Financier | Clarence Ver Steeg | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1951 | Winner | History of Marshall Field and Co., 1852-1906 | Robert Twyman | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1950 | Winner | Horace Greeley: Nineteenth Century Crusader | Glyndon Van Deusen | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1949 | Winner | Steam Power on the American Farm: A Chapter in Agricultural History, 1850-1920 | Reynold Wik | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1948 | Winner | John William Draper and the Religion of Science | Donald Fleming | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1947 | Winner | The Struggle for Justice in the Spanish Conquest of America | Lewis Hanke | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1946 | Winner | Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829 | Arthur Bestor | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1945 | Winner | John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier | John Alden | University of Michigan Press |
| 1943 | Winner | The American Frontier in Hawaii: The Pioneers, 1789-1843 | Harold Bradley | Stanford University Press |
| 1941 | Winner | The Background of the Revolution in Maryland | Charles Barker | Yale University Press |
| 1939 | Winner | James Kent: A Study in Conservatism | John Horton | D. Appleton and Company |