| 2026 | Winner | Things in Nature Merely Grow | Yiyun Li | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2026 | Finalist | Baldwin, Styron, and Me | Mélikah Abdelmoumen | Unknown |
| 2026 | Finalist | There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America | Brian Goldstone | Crown |
| 2026 | Longlist | A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck | Sophie Elmhirst | Riverhead Books |
| 2026 | Longlist | Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom | Rebecca Grant | Simon & Schuster |
| 2026 | Longlist | America, América: A New History of the New World | Greg Grandin | Penguin Press |
| 2026 | Longlist | Baldwin: A Love Story | Nicholas Boggs | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2026 | Longlist | Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free | Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson | Simon & Schuster |
| 2026 | Longlist | Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America | Jane Borden | Simon & Schuster |
| 2026 | Longlist | Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue | Yoko Tawada | Unknown |
| 2026 | Longlist | Ghosts of Hiroshima | Charles Pellegrino | Unknown |
| 2026 | Longlist | Is a River Alive? | Robert Macfarlane | W. W. Norton |
| 2026 | Longlist | Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools | Mary Annette Pember | Pantheon |
| 2026 | Longlist | Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings | Honorée Fannone Jeffers | Unknown |
| 2026 | Longlist | Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers | Caroline Fraser | Penguin Press |
| 2026 | Longlist | One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This | Omar El Akkad | Knopf |
| 2026 | Longlist | Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism | Eve L. Ewing | Random House |
| 2026 | Longlist | Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement | Elaine Weiss | Simon & Schuster |
| 2026 | Longlist | The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature | Gerald Howard | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 2026 | Longlist | The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America | David Baron | Liveright |
| 2026 | Longlist | Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship | Dana A. Williams | Amistad |
| 2026 | Longlist | We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine | Alissa Wilkinson | Liveright |
| 2026 | Longlist | We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution | Jill Lepore | Liveright |
| 2026 | Longlist | Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights | Keisha N. Blain | W. W. Norton |
| 2025 | Winner | A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon | Kevin Fedarko | Scribner |
| 2025 | Finalist | Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV | Emily Nussbaum | Random House |
| 2025 | Finalist | Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space | Adam Higginbotham | Simon & Schuster |
| 2025 | Longlist | By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land | Rebecca Nagle | HarperCollins |
| 2025 | Longlist | Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz | József Debreczeni | Unknown |
| 2025 | Longlist | Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis | Jonathan Blitzer | Penguin Press |
| 2025 | Longlist | Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir | Tessa Hulls | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2025 | Longlist | Hip-Hop Is History | Questlove, Ben Greenman | Orion |
| 2025 | Longlist | Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman | Callum Robinson | HarperCollins |
| 2025 | Longlist | Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York | Ross Perlin | Grove Atlantic |
| 2025 | Longlist | Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People | Tiya Miles | Penguin Press |
| 2025 | Longlist | Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistance | Victoria Blanco | Coffee House Press |
| 2025 | Longlist | Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity | Ellen van Neerven | Unknown |
| 2025 | Longlist | Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order | Yuan Yang | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 2025 | Longlist | Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water | Amorina Kingdon | Random House |
| 2025 | Longlist | Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde | Alexis Pauline Gumbs | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2025 | Longlist | The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets | Thomas R. Cech | W. W. Norton |
| 2025 | Longlist | The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective | Steven Johnson | Random House |
| 2025 | Longlist | There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension | Hanif Abdurraqib | Penguin Books |
| 2025 | Longlist | This Part Is Silent: A Life between Cultures | SJ Kim | And Other Stories |
| 2025 | Longlist | Thunder Song | Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe | Unknown |
| 2025 | Longlist | When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion | Julie Satow | Vintage Books |
| 2025 | Longlist | Whiskey Tender | Deborah Jackson Taffa | Harper |
| 2024 | Winner | We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America | Roxanna Asgarian | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration | Jake Bittle | Simon & Schuster |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Talk | Darrin Bell | Henry Holt and Company |
| 2024 | Longlist | A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars | Erin Sharkey | Milkweed Editions |
| 2024 | Longlist | A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them | Timothy Egan | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 2024 | Longlist | A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial | Viet Thanh Nguyen | Grove Press |
| 2024 | Longlist | Airplane Mode: An Irrelevant History of Travel | Shahnaz Habib | Catapult |
| 2024 | Longlist | American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress | Wesley Lowery | HarperCollins |
| 2024 | Longlist | An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created | Santi Elijah Holley | HarperCollins |
| 2024 | Longlist | Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World | Christian Cooper | Random House |
| 2024 | Longlist | Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon | Melissa L. Sevigny | W. W. Norton |
| 2024 | Longlist | He/She/They: How We Talk about Gender and Why It Matters | Schuyler Bailar | Unknown |
| 2024 | Longlist | Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom | Ilyon Woo | Simon & Schuster |
| 2024 | Longlist | Okinawa | Susumu Higa | W. W. Norton |
| 2024 | Longlist | Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino.” | Héctor Tobar | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2024 | Longlist | Poverty, By America | Matthew Desmond | Crown |
| 2024 | Longlist | Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America | Matika Wilbur | Unknown |
| 2024 | Longlist | The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church | Rachel L. Swarns | Random House |
| 2024 | Longlist | The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul | Scott W. Berg | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| 2024 | Longlist | The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight | Andrew Leland | Penguin Press |
| 2024 | Longlist | The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel | Meredith Bagby | HarperCollins |
| 2024 | Longlist | The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine | Ricardo Nuila | Simon & Schuster |
| 2024 | Longlist | The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover Up in Oakland | Ali Winston, Darwin BondGraham | Simon & Schuster |
| 2024 | Longlist | Wonder Drug: The Secret History of Thalidomide in America and Its Hidden Victims | Jennifer Vanderbes | Random House |
| 2023 | Winner | An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us | Ed Yong | Random House |
| 2023 | Finalist | Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage | Rachel E. Gross | W. W. Norton |
| 2023 | Finalist | Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir | Margo Jefferson | Pantheon |
| 2023 | Longlist | Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me | Ada Calhoun | Grove Press |
| 2023 | Longlist | By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners | Margaret A. Burnham | W. W. Norton |
| 2023 | Longlist | Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands | Kate Beaton | Unknown |
| 2023 | Longlist | Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons | Jeremy Denk | Random House Trade Paperbacks |
| 2023 | Longlist | Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America | Pekka Hämäläinen | Liveright |
| 2023 | Longlist | Lost & Found | Kathryn Schulz | Random House Trade Paperbacks |
| 2023 | Longlist | Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe | Keith O'Brien | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| 2023 | Longlist | Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth | Elizabeth Williamson | Penguin Press |
| 2023 | Longlist | Solito: A Memoir | Javier Zamora | Hogarth |
| 2023 | Longlist | Stay True: A Memoir | Hua Hsu | Doubleday |
| 2023 | Longlist | The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir | Karen Cheung | Random House |
| 2023 | Longlist | The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness | Meghan O’Rourke | Riverhead Books |
| 2023 | Longlist | The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir | Ingrid Rojas Contreras | Doubleday |
| 2023 | Longlist | The Third Person | Emma Grove | Unknown |
| 2023 | Longlist | The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth | Ben Rawlence | St. Martin's Press |
| 2023 | Longlist | The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide | Steven Thrasher | Unknown |
| 2023 | Longlist | This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You | Susan Rogers, Ogi Ogas | W. W. Norton |
| 2023 | Longlist | Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation | Scott Carney, Jason Miklian | Ecco |
| 2022 | Winner | A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance | Hanif Abdurraqib | Random House |
| 2022 | Finalist | Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness | Kristen Radtke | Pantheon |
| 2022 | Finalist | Four Hundred Souls | Ibram X. Kendi, Keisha N. Blain, eds. | One World |
| 2022 | Finalist | Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019 | Keisha N. Blain Ibram X. Kendi | One World |
| 2022 | Longlist | A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey | Jonathan Meiburg | Vintage Books |
| 2022 | Longlist | Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South | Winfred Rembert, Erin I. Kelly | Bloomsbury |
| 2022 | Longlist | Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty | Patrick Radden Keefer | Unknown |
| 2022 | Longlist | Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II | Daniel James Brown | Viking |
| 2022 | Longlist | Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law | Mary Roach | W. W. Norton |
| 2022 | Longlist | Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men | Katrine Marçal | Abrams Press |
| 2022 | Longlist | My Broken Language | Quiara Alegría Hudes | One World |
| 2022 | Longlist | Poet Warrior | Joy Harjo | W. W. Norton |
| 2022 | Longlist | Smile: The Story of a Face | Sarah Ruhl | Simon & Schuster |
| 2022 | Longlist | The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet | John Green | Penguin Press |
| 2022 | Longlist | The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer | Dean Jobb | Unknown |
| 2022 | Longlist | The Glitter in the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds | Jon Dunn | Basic Books |
| 2022 | Longlist | The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice | Scott Ellsworth | Dutton |
| 2022 | Longlist | The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth | Sam Quinones | Bloomsbury |
| 2022 | Longlist | The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live | Danielle Dreilinger | W. W. Norton |
| 2022 | Longlist | The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together | Heather McGhee | Profile Books |
| 2022 | Longlist | Tom Stoppard: A Life | Hermione Lee | Faber & Faber |
| 2022 | Longlist | Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future | Elizabeth Kolbert | Crown |
| 2022 | Longlist | Why Peacocks? An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World's Most Magnificent Bird | Sean Flynn | Simon & Schuster |
| 2021 | Winner | Fathoms: The World in the Whale | Rebecca Giggs | Simon & Schuster |
| 2021 | Finalist | Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir | Natasha Trethewey | Ecco |
| 2021 | Finalist | Just Us: An American Conversation | Claudia Rankine | Graywolf Press |
| 2021 | Longlist | Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents | Isabel Wilkerson | Random House |
| 2021 | Longlist | Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America | Laila Lalami | Vintage Books |
| 2021 | Longlist | Eat the Buddha: The Story of Modern Tibet through the People of One Town | Barbara Demick | Granta Books |
| 2021 | Longlist | God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World | Alan Mikhail | Liveright |
| 2021 | Longlist | Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family | Robert Kolker | Doubleday |
| 2021 | Longlist | Humankind: A Hopeful History | Rutger Bregman | Little, Brown |
| 2021 | Longlist | Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning | Cathy Park Hong | One World |
| 2021 | Longlist | My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir | Jenn Shapland | Tin House |
| 2021 | Longlist | One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924-1965 | Jia Lynn Yang | W. W. Norton |
| 2021 | Longlist | Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis | Jeffrey H. Jackson | Algonquin Books |
| 2021 | Longlist | Recollections of My Nonexistence | Rebecca Solnit | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 2021 | Longlist | The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir | Michele Harper | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 2021 | Longlist | The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creatures in the Natural World | Patrik Svensson | Ecco |
| 2021 | Longlist | The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X | Les Payne, Tamara Payne | Liveright |
| 2021 | Longlist | The Dragons, The Giant, The Women | Wayétu Moore | Graywolf Press |
| 2021 | Longlist | The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch | Miles Harvey | Little, Brown |
| 2021 | Longlist | The Undocumented Americans | Karla Cornejo Villavicencio | One World |
| 2020 | Winner | Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster | Adam Higginbotham | Henry Holt and Company |
| 2020 | Finalist | The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present | David Treuer | Riverhead Books |
| 2020 | Finalist | Figuring | Maria Popova | Pantheon |
| 2020 | Longlist | American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race | Douglas Brinkley | Harper |
| 2020 | Longlist | An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago | Alex Kotlowitz | Nan A. Talese |
| 2020 | Longlist | Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination | Brian Jay Jones | Penguin Press |
| 2020 | Longlist | Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life | Louise Aronson | Bloomsbury |
| 2020 | Longlist | Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee | Casey Cep | Knopf |
| 2020 | Longlist | In the Country of Women | Susan Straight | Catapult |
| 2020 | Longlist | In the Dream House: A Memoir | Carmen Maria Machado | Graywolf Press |
| 2020 | Longlist | Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men | Caroline Criado-Perez | Chatto & Windus |
| 2020 | Longlist | Janis: Her Life and Music | Holly George-Warren | Simon & Schuster |
| 2020 | Longlist | Losing Earth: A Recent History | Nathaniel Rich | Pan Macmillan |
| 2020 | Longlist | Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves | Frans de Waal | W. W. Norton |
| 2020 | Longlist | Parkland | Dave Cullen | HarperCollins |
| 2020 | Longlist | Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning | Elliot Ackerman | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 2020 | Longlist | Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland | Patrick Radden Keefe | William Collins |
| 2020 | Longlist | Silver, Sword & Stone: Three Crucibles of the Latin American Story | Marie Arana | Simon & Schuster |
| 2020 | Longlist | The Ice at the End of the World: Greenland's Secret Past and Earth's Perilous Future | Jon Gertner | Random House |
| 2020 | Longlist | The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys across the Last Untamed Frontier | Ian Urbina | Knopf |
| 2020 | Longlist | The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations | Toni Morrison | Knopf |
| 2020 | Longlist | The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming | David Wallace-Wells | Penguin Press |
| 2020 | Longlist | The Yellow House | Sarah M. Broom | Grove Press |
| 2020 | Longlist | Underland: A Deep Time Journey | Robert Macfarlane | W. W. Norton |
| 2020 | Longlist | What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance | Carolyn Forché | Penguin Press |
| 2019 | Winner | Heavy: An American Memoir | Kiese Laymon | Scribner |
| 2019 | Finalist | The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border | Francisco Cantú | Riverhead Books |
| 2019 | Finalist | Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America | Beth Macy | Little, Brown |
| 2019 | Longlist | Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis | Sam Anderson | Crown |
| 2019 | Longlist | Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall | Tim Mohr | Algonquin Books |
| 2019 | Longlist | Educated: A Memoir | Tara Westover | Random House |
| 2019 | Longlist | Fascism: A Warning | Madeleine Albright | Harper |
| 2019 | Longlist | High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing | Ben Austen | Harper |
| 2019 | Longlist | How to Write an Autobiographical Novel | Alexander Chee | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2019 | Longlist | I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer | Michelle McNamara | Harper |
| 2019 | Longlist | In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin | Lindsey Hilsum | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2019 | Longlist | Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry | Imani Perry | Beacon Press |
| 2019 | Longlist | Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life | Eric Klinenberg | Crown |
| 2019 | Longlist | Ruth Bader Ginsburg | Jane Sherron De Hart | Knopf |
| 2019 | Longlist | The Cost of Living | Deborah Levy | Bloomsbury |
| 2019 | Longlist | The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century | Kirk Wallace Johnson | Hutchinson |
| 2019 | Longlist | The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After | Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil | Crown Archetype |
| 2019 | Longlist | The Library Book | Susan Orlean | Simon & Schuster |
| 2019 | Longlist | The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy | Anna Clark | Metropolitan Books |
| 2019 | Longlist | The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row | Anthony Ray Hinton, Lara Love Hardin | St. Martin's Press |
| 2019 | Longlist | There Will Be No Miracles Here | Casey Gerald | Unknown |
| 2019 | Longlist | Tigerland, 1968-1969: A City Divided, a Nation Torn Apart, and a Magical Season of Healing | Wil Haygood | Knopf |
| 2018 | Finalist | Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI | David Grann | Doubleday |
| 2018 | Finalist | The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner | Daniel Ellsberg | Bloomsbury |
| 2018 | Shortlist | You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir | Sherman Alexie | Little, Brown |
| 2018 | Longlist | Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street | Sheelah Kolhatkar | Random House |
| 2018 | Longlist | Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News | Kevin Young | Graywolf Press |
| 2018 | Longlist | Gorbachev: His Life and Times | William Taubman | W. W. Norton |
| 2018 | Longlist | Grant | Ron Chernow | Penguin Press |
| 2018 | Longlist | Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam | Mark Bowden | Atlantic Monthly Press |
| 2018 | Longlist | Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body | Roxane Gay | HarperCollins |
| 2018 | Longlist | Leonardo Da Vinci | Walter Isaacson | Simon & Schuster |
| 2018 | Longlist | Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America | James Forman Jr. | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2018 | Longlist | Richard Nixon: The Life | John A. Farrell | Doubleday |
| 2018 | Longlist | The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny | Michael Wallis | Liveright |
| 2018 | Longlist | The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea | Jack E. Davis | Liveright |
| 2018 | Longlist | The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve | Stephen Greenblatt | W. W. Norton |
| 2018 | Longlist | The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease | Meredith Wadman | Penguin Press |
| 2018 | Longlist | Theft by Finding: Diaries, 1977-2002 | David Sedaris | Little, Brown |
| 2018 | Longlist | True South: Henry Hampton and Eyes on the Prize, the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement | Jon Else | Viking |
| 2018 | Longlist | We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria | Wendy Pearlman | Custom House |
| 2018 | Longlist | We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy | Ta-Nehisi Coates | One World |
| 2018 | Longlist | Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir | Amy Tan | Ecco |
| 2017 | Winner | Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City | Matthew Desmond | Crown |
| 2017 | Finalist | Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America | Patrick Phillips | W. W. Norton |
| 2017 | Finalist | The Firebrand and the First Lady: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice | Patricia Bell-Scott | Knopf |
| 2017 | Longlist | Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives | Gary Younge | Unknown |
| 2017 | Longlist | Cast Away: True Stories of Survival from Europe's Refugee Crisis | Charlotte McDonald-Gibson | The New Press |
| 2017 | Longlist | City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp | Ben Rawlence | Picador |
| 2017 | Longlist | Exiled in America: Life on the Margins in a Residential Motel | Christopher P. Dum | Columbia University Press |
| 2017 | Longlist | Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs | Robert Kanigel | Knopf |
| 2017 | Longlist | Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War | Mary Roach | W. W. Norton |
| 2017 | Longlist | Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race | Margot Lee Shetterly | HarperCollins |
| 2017 | Longlist | How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS | David France | Vintage Books |
| 2017 | Longlist | Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul | James McBride | Spiegel & Grau |
| 2017 | Longlist | Lab Girl | Hope Jahren | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| 2017 | Longlist | Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies | Ross King | Bloomsbury |
| 2017 | Longlist | Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters' Eyes | Paul Staiti | Bloomsbury |
| 2017 | Longlist | Paper: Paging through History | Mark Kurlansky | W. W. Norton |
| 2017 | Longlist | The Dragon behind the Glass. A True Story of Power, Obsession, and the World's Most Coveted Fish | Emily Voight | Unknown |
| 2017 | Longlist | The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars | Dava Sobel | Unknown |
| 2017 | Longlist | The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks | Terry Tempest Williams | Picador |
| 2017 | Longlist | The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter | David Sax | PublicAffairs |
| 2017 | Longlist | Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South | Beth Macy | Little, Brown |
| 2017 | Longlist | White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America | Nancy Isenberg | Viking |
| 2017 | Longlist | Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File | John Edgar Wideman | Scribner |
| 2016 | Winner | Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs | Sally Mann | Little, Brown |
| 2016 | Finalist | The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science | Andrea Wulf | Knopf |
| 2016 | Finalist | H Is for Hawk | Helen Macdonald | Jonathan Cape |
| 2016 | Longlist | American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity | Christian G. Appy | Penguin Press |
| 2016 | Longlist | Between the World and Me | Ta-Nehisi Coates | Spiegel & Grau |
| 2016 | Longlist | Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel | Carl Safina | Henry Holt and Company |
| 2016 | Longlist | Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery | Henry Marsh | Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
| 2016 | Longlist | Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal | Jay Parini | Doubleday |
| 2016 | Longlist | Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America | Ari Berman | Macmillan |
| 2016 | Longlist | How the World Moves: The Odyssey of an American Indian Family | Peter Nabokov | Viking |
| 2016 | Longlist | Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi | Hayden Herrera | Thames & Hudson |
| 2016 | Longlist | M Train | Patti Smith | Knopf |
| 2016 | Longlist | On the Move | Oliver Sacks | Picador |
| 2016 | Longlist | Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers | Simon Winchester | Unknown |
| 2016 | Longlist | Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America | Wil Haygood | Vintage Books |
| 2016 | Longlist | Something Must Be Done about Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle | Kristen Green | Harper |
| 2016 | Longlist | The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power | Steve Fraser | Little, Brown |
| 2016 | Longlist | The Witches: Salem, 1692 | Stacy Schiff | Little, Brown |
| 2016 | Longlist | Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security | Sarah Chayes | W. W. Norton |
| 2016 | Longlist | To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science | Steven Weinberg | Harper Perennial |
| 2015 | Winner | Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption | Bryan Stevenson | Spiegel & Grau |
| 2015 | Finalist | The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History | Elizabeth Kolbert | Henry Holt |
| 2015 | Finalist | Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin and Sadat at Camp David | Lawrence Wright | Vintage Books |
| 2015 | Longlist | Blood Royal: A True Tale of Crime and Detection in Medieval Paris | Eric Jager | Little, Brown |
| 2015 | Longlist | Dark Invasion: 1915; Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America | Howard Blum | HarperCollins |
| 2015 | Longlist | Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local-and Helped Save an American Town | Beth Macy | Little, Brown |
| 2015 | Longlist | In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette | Hampton Sides | Doubleday |
| 2015 | Longlist | Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story | Rick Bragg | Unknown |
| 2015 | Longlist | John Quincy Adams: American Visionary | Fred Kaplan | Unknown |
| 2015 | Longlist | No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State | Glenn Greenwald | Metropolitan Books |
| 2015 | Longlist | Pandora's DNA: Tracing the Breast Cancer Genes through History, Science, and One Family Tree | Lizzie Stark | Chicago Review Press |
| 2015 | Longlist | Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream | Joshua Davis | Macmillan |
| 2015 | Longlist | The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution | Jonathan Eig | Macmillan |
| 2015 | Longlist | The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us | Diane Ackerman | W. W. Norton |
| 2015 | Longlist | The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution | Walter Isaacson | Simon & Schuster |
| 2015 | Longlist | The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses | Kevin Birmingham | Penguin Press |
| 2015 | Longlist | The Secret History of Wonder Woman | Jill Lepore | Vintage Books |
| 2015 | Longlist | The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League | Jeff Hobbs | Simon & Schuster |
| 2015 | Longlist | The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC-1492 AD | Simon Schama | Ecco |
| 2014 | Winner | The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism | Doris Kearns Goodwin | Simon & Schuster |
| 2014 | Finalist | Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital | Sheri Fink | Crown |
| 2014 | Finalist | On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History | Nicholas A. Basbanes | Knopf |
| 2014 | Longlist | Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of our Fel- low Creatures | Virginia Morell | Crown |
| 2014 | Longlist | Bolivar: American Liberator | Marie Arana | Simon & Schuster |
| 2014 | Longlist | Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin | Jill Lepore | Knopf |
| 2014 | Longlist | Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety | Eric Schlosser | Penguin Press |
| 2014 | Longlist | Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography | Richard Rodriguez | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 2014 | Longlist | Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief | Lawrence Wright | Vintage Books |
| 2014 | Longlist | Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal | Mary Roach | W. W. Norton |
| 2014 | Longlist | Jack London: An American Life | Earle Labor | Cambridge University Press |
| 2014 | Longlist | Johnny Cash: The Life | Robert Hilburn | Back Bay Books |
| 2014 | Longlist | Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East | Scott Anderson | Anchor |
| 2014 | Longlist | On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks | Simon Garfield | Unknown |
| 2014 | Longlist | Wilson | A. Scott Berg | G. P. Putnam's Sons |
| 2014 | Longlist | The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics | Daniel James Brown | Viking |
| 2014 | Longlist | The Faraway Nearby | Rebecca Solnit | Viking |
| 2014 | Longlist | The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code | Margalit Fox | Ecco |
| 2014 | Longlist | The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking | Brendan I. Koerner | Crown |
| 2014 | Longlist | The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America | George Packer | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2014 | Longlist | To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care | Cris Beam | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2014 | Longlist | Year Zero: A History of 1945 | Ian Buruma | Penguin Press |
| 2014 | Longlist | Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth | Reza Aslan | Random House Trade Paperbacks |
| 2013 | Winner | Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis | Timothy Egan | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2013 | Finalist | Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic | David Quammen | W. W. Norton |
| 2013 | Finalist | The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death | Jill Lepore | Knopf |
| 2013 | Longlist | Barack Obama: The Story | David Maraniss | Simon & Schuster |
| 2013 | Longlist | Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power | Jon Meacham | Random House |
| 2013 | Longlist | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Katherine Boo | Random House |
| 2013 | Longlist | Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years among the Poorest Children in America | Jonathan Kozol | Crown |
| 2013 | Longlist | Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats | Kristen Iversen | Crown |
| 2013 | Longlist | Leonardo and the Last Supper | Ross King | Walker & Company |
| 2013 | Longlist | James Joyce: A New Biography | Gordon Bowker | Orion |
| 2013 | Longlist | Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea | Callum Roberts | Viking |
| 2013 | Longlist | Joseph Anton: A Memoir | Salman Rushdie | Random House |
| 2013 | Longlist | Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking | Susan Cain | Crown |
| 2013 | Longlist | Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy | Paul Thomas Murphy | Unknown |
| 2013 | Longlist | Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America | Tanner Colby | Penguin Books |
| 2013 | Longlist | The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court | Jeffrey Toobin | Doubleday |
| 2013 | Longlist | The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson | Robert A. Caro | Knopf |
| 2013 | Longlist | The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy | David Nasaw | Penguin Press |
| 2013 | Longlist | The Social Conquest of Earth | Edward O. Wilson | Liveright |
| 2013 | Longlist | Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? | Jeanette Winterson | Grove Atlantic |
| 2013 | Longlist | Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe | George Dyson | Pantheon |
| 2013 | Longlist | Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story | Jim Holt | Liveright |
| 2013 | Longlist | Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars | Paul Ingrassia | Simon & Schuster |
| 2012 | Winner | Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman | Robert K. Massie | Random House |
| 2012 | Finalist | Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention | Manning Marable | Viking |
| 2012 | Finalist | The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood | James Gleick | Fourth Estate |
| 2012 | Longlist | Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet | Jennifer Homans | Granta Books |
| 2012 | Longlist | Arguably: Essays | Christopher Hitchens | McClelland & Stewart |
| 2012 | Longlist | Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools | Steven Brill | Simon & Schuster |
| 2012 | Longlist | Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President | Candice Millard | Vintage Books |
| 2012 | Longlist | Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock | David Margolick | Yale University Press |
| 2012 | Longlist | Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion | Janet Reitman | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2012 | Longlist | Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend | Susan Orlean | Simon & Schuster |
| 2012 | Longlist | The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water | Charles Fishman | Free Press |
| 2012 | Longlist | The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Siddhartha Mukherjee | Scribner |
| 2012 | Longlist | The Greater Journey: American in Paris | David McCullough | Unknown |
| 2012 | Longlist | The Memory Palace | Mira Bartók | Free Press |
| 2012 | Longlist | The Paper Garden: An Artist (Begins Her Work Life) at 72 | Molly Peacock | McClelland & Stewart |
| 2012 | Longlist | The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement | David Brooks | Random House |
| 2012 | Longlist | The Swerve: How the World Became Modern | Stephen Greenblatt | W. W. Norton |
| 2012 | Longlist | Thinking, Fast and Slow | Daniel Kahneman | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2012 | Longlist | Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time | Mark Adams | Text Publishing |
| 2012 | Longlist | Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption | Laura Hillenbrand | Ballantine Books |