| 2026 | Winner | Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City | Bench Ansfield | W. W. Norton |
| 2025 | Winner | The United States Governed By Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery | Jonathan D. S. Schroeder | Unknown |
| 2024 | Winner | The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History | Ned Blackhawk | Yale University Press |
| 2023 | Winner | Half American | Matthew F. Delmont | Unknown |
| 2022 | Co-winner | All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake | Tiya Miles | Random House |
| 2022 | Co-winner | Of Fear and Strangers | George Makari | Unknown |
| 2021 | Co-winner | Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir | Natasha Trethewey | Ecco |
| 2021 | Co-winner | Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War | Vincent Brown | Belknap Press |
| 2020 | Winner | Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century | Charles King | Doubleday |
| 2019 | Winner | The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War | Andrew Delbanco | Penguin Press |
| 2018 | Winner | Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News | Kevin Young | Graywolf Press |
| 2017 | Winner | Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race | Margot Lee Shetterly | HarperCollins |
| 2016 | Co-winner | The Gay Revolution | Lillian Faderman | Unknown |
| 2016 | Co-winner | What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing | Brian Seibert | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2015 | Winner | A Tale of Two Plantations | Richard S. Dunn | Unknown |
| 2014 | Winner | My Promised Land | Ari Shavit | Unknown |
| 2013 | Winner | Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity | Andrew Solomon | Scribner |
| 2012 | Co-winner | American Oracle | David W. Blight | Unknown |
| 2012 | Co-winner | Less Than Human | David Livingstone Smith | Unknown |
| 2011 | Co-winner | Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade | David Eltis | Unknown |
| 2011 | Co-winner | The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration | Isabel Wilkerson | Random House |
| 2009 | Winner | The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family | Annette Gordon-Reed | W. W. Norton |
| 2008 | Winner | Infidel | Ayaan Hirsi Ali | Unknown |
| 2007 | Winner | Steel Drivin’ Man | Scott Reynolds Nelson | Unknown |
| 2006 | Winner | New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan | Jill Lepore | Knopf |
| 2005 | Co-winner | M•A•C•N•O•L•I•A | A. Van Jordan | Unknown |
| 2005 | Co-winner | Unforgivable Blackness | Geoffrey C. Ward | Unknown |
| 2004 | Co-winner | Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. | Ira Berlin | Belknap Press |
| 2004 | Co-winner | Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx | Adrian Nicole LeBlanc | Scribner |
| 2003 | Winner | "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide | Samantha Power | Basic Books |
| 2002 | Co-winner | Quincy Jones | Quincy Jones | Unknown |
| 2002 | Co-winner | Vernon Can Read | Vernon E. Jordan Jr. | Unknown |
| 2001 | Co-winner | Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner | F.X. Toole | Unknown |
| 2001 | Co-winner | W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 | David Levering Lewis | Henry Holt and Company |
| 2000 | Winner | Out of Place | Edward W. Said | Unknown |
| 1999 | Winner | Walking with the Wind | John Lewis | Unknown |
| 1998 | Winner | The Black Notebooks | Toi Derricotte | Unknown |
| 1997 | Winner | The Color of Water | James McBride | Unknown |
| 1996 | Winner | Amazing Grace | Jonathan Kozol | Unknown |
| 1995 | Co-winner | Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White | Brent Staples | Avon Books |
| 1995 | Co-winner | The Science and Politics of Racial Research | William H. Tucker | Unknown |
| 1994 | Co-winner | A Different Mirror | Ronald Takaki | Unknown |
| 1994 | Co-winner | W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 | David Levering Lewis | Henry Holt and Company |
| 1993 | Co-winner | In My Father’s House | Kwame Anthony Appiah | Unknown |
| 1993 | Co-winner | The Civilization of the Goddess | Marija Gimbutas | Unknown |
| 1992 | Co-winner | Lessons and Legacies | Peter Hayes, ed. | Unknown |
| 1992 | Co-winner | Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Non-Fiction | Melissa Fay Greene | Secker & Warburg |
| 1992 | Co-winner | The Homeplace | Marilyn Nelson Waniek | Unknown |
| 1992 | Co-winner | The IQ Mythology | Elaine Mensh | Unknown |
| 1991 | Co-winner | African Ark | Carol Beckwith | Unknown |
| 1991 | Co-winner | Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience | Walter A. Jackson | Unknown |
| 1991 | Co-winner | The Arrogance of Faith | Forrest G. Wood | Unknown |
| 1990 | Winner | The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV: From the American Revolution to World War I | Hugh Honour | Harvard University Press |
| 1989 | Co-winner | A Life in the Struggle | George Lipsitz | Unknown |
| 1989 | Co-winner | Dreamings | Peter Sutton | Unknown |
| 1989 | Co-winner | Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 | Taylor Branch | Simon & Schuster |
| 1989 | Co-winner | The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers | Henry Louis Gates Jr. | Unknown |
| 1988 | Co-winner | Living Maya | Jeffrey Jay Foxx | Unknown |
| 1988 | Co-winner | Whose Votes Count? | Abigail M. Thernstrom | Unknown |
| 1987 | Co-winner | Spirit of Survival | Gail Sheehy | Unknown |
| 1987 | Co-winner | The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II, 1941–1967: I Dream a World | Arnold Rampersad | Oxford University Press |
| 1986 | Co-winner | Freedom Rising | James North | Unknown |
| 1986 | Co-winner | Kachinas | Barton Wright | Unknown |
| 1986 | Co-winner | Nazis in Skokie | Donald Alexander Downs | Unknown |
| 1985 | Winner | The Abandonment of the Jews | David S. Wyman | Unknown |
| 1984 | Co-winner | From Immigrants to Ethnics | Humbert S. Nelli | Unknown |
| 1984 | Co-winner | Pre-Columbian Art | Jose Alcina Franch | Unknown |
| 1983 | Co-winner | Ake | Wole Soyinka | Unknown |
| 1983 | Co-winner | Hunger of Memory | Richard Rodriguez | Unknown |
| 1982 | Co-winner | Evangelist of Race | Geoffrey G. Field | Unknown |
| 1982 | Co-winner | People of the Sacred Mountain | Peter John Powell | Unknown |
| 1981 | Co-winner | Maasai | Carol Beckwith | Unknown |
| 1981 | Co-winner | Song From the Earth | Jamake Highwater | Unknown |
| 1980 | Co-winner | The !Kung San | Richard Borshay Lee | Unknown |
| 1980 | Co-winner | The Ecology of Human Development | Urie Bronfenbrenner | Unknown |
| 1979 | Winner | The Bushmen | Phillip V. Tobias, ed. | Unknown |
| 1978 | Co-winner | The Legacy of Malthus | Allan Chase | Unknown |
| 1978 | Co-winner | The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts | Maxine Hong Kingston | Knopf |
| 1977 | Co-winner | Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality | Richard Kluger | Knopf |
| 1977 | Co-winner | Years of Infamy | Michi Weglyn | Unknown |
| 1976 | Co-winner | The Arabs | Thomas Kiernan | Unknown |
| 1976 | Co-winner | The Myth of the Jewish Race | Raphael Patai | Unknown |
| 1976 | Co-winner | The War Against the Jews | Lucy S. Dawidowicz | Unknown |
| 1975 | Co-winner | Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made | Eugene D. Genovese | Unknown |
| 1975 | Co-winner | The Aryan Myth | Leon Poliakov | Unknown |
| 1974 | Co-winner | Doctor and the Aborigines | Charles Duguid | Unknown |
| 1974 | Co-winner | Justice in South Africa | Albie Sachs | Unknown |
| 1974 | Co-winner | The Dreyfus Case | Louis Snyder | Unknown |
| 1974 | Co-winner | The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright | Michel Fabre | Unknown |
| 1973 | Co-winner | Behind Ghetto Walls | Lee Rainwater | Unknown |
| 1973 | Co-winner | Men & Brothers | Betty Fladeland | Unknown |
| 1973 | Co-winner | The Water Is Wide | Pat Conroy | Unknown |
| 1972 | Co-winner | Outcasts from Evolution | John S. Haller Jr. | Unknown |
| 1972 | Co-winner | Slavery in the Structure of American Politics | Donald L. Robinson | Unknown |
| 1972 | Co-winner | The Autobiography of an Unknown South African | Naboth Mokgatle | Unknown |
| 1972 | Co-winner | The Black Image in the White Mind | George M. Fredrickson | Unknown |
| 1972 | Co-winner | The Healing of a Nation | David Loye | Unknown |
| 1971 | Co-winner | A History of the African People | Robert W. July | Unknown |
| 1971 | Co-winner | Black Freedom | Carleton Mabee | Unknown |
| 1971 | Co-winner | La Raza | Stan Steiner | Unknown |
| 1971 | Co-winner | The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca | Anthony F.C. Wallace | Unknown |
| 1970 | Co-winner | Custer Died for Your Sins | Vine Deloria Jr. | Unknown |
| 1970 | Co-winner | Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South | Dan T. Carter | LSU Press |
| 1970 | Co-winner | The Great Betrayal | Audrie Girdner | Unknown |
| 1970 | Co-winner | The Negro in Brazilian Society | Florestan Fernandes | Unknown |
| 1969 | Co-winner | Negro and White Children | E. Earl Baughman | Unknown |
| 1969 | Co-winner | The American Indian Today | Stuart Levine | Unknown |
| 1969 | Co-winner | The Leo Frank Case | Leonard Dinnerstein | Unknown |
| 1968 | Co-winner | Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear | Robert Coles | Little, Brown |
| 1968 | Co-winner | The Destruction of the European Jews | Raul Hilberg | Unknown |
| 1968 | Co-winner | The Jews Among the Nations | Erich Kahler | Unknown |
| 1968 | Co-winner | Warrant for Genocide | Norman Cohn | Unknown |
| 1967 | Co-winner | La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York | Oscar Lewis | Random House |
| 1967 | Co-winner | The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture | David Brion Davis | Cornell University Press |
| 1966 | Co-winner | Manchild in the Promised Land | Claude Brown | Unknown |
| 1966 | Co-winner | The Autobiography of Malcolm X | Malcolm X | Unknown |
| 1966 | Co-winner | The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought | H.C. Baldry | Unknown |
| 1966 | Co-winner | Your Heredity and Environment | Amram Scheinfeld | Unknown |
| 1965 | Co-winner | A History of the Jews | Abram L. Sachar | Unknown |
| 1965 | Co-winner | Assimilation in American Life | Milton M. Gordon | Unknown |
| 1965 | Co-winner | Mississippi | James W. Silver | Unknown |
| 1965 | Co-winner | The Struggle for Equality | James M. McPherson | Unknown |
| 1964 | Co-winner | Beyond the Melting Pot | Nathan Glazer | Unknown |
| 1964 | Co-winner | Faith and Prejudice | Bernhard E. Olson | Unknown |
| 1964 | Co-winner | The New World of Negro Americans | Harold R. Isaacs | Unknown |
| 1963 | Winner | Mankind Evolving | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Unknown |
| 1962 | Co-winner | Antislavery | Dwight L. Dumond | Unknown |
| 1962 | Co-winner | Black Like Me | John Howard Griffin | Unknown |
| 1961 | Co-winner | The Reluctant African | Louis E. Lomax | Unknown |
| 1961 | Co-winner | To Sir, With Love | E.R. Braithwaite | Unknown |
| 1960 | Co-winner | I Speak for Myself | John Haynes Holmes | Unknown |
| 1960 | Co-winner | The Lost Cities of Africa | Basil Davidson | Unknown |
| 1959 | Co-winner | Racial and Cultural Minorities | George Eaton Simpson | Unknown |
| 1959 | Co-winner | Stride Toward Freedom | Martin Luther King Jr. | Unknown |
| 1958 | Co-winner | Handbook on Race Relations | South African Institute of Race Relations | Unknown |
| 1958 | Co-winner | White Mother | Jessie B. Sams | Unknown |
| 1957 | Co-winner | Naught for Your Comfort | Trevor Huddleston | Unknown |
| 1957 | Co-winner | The Masters and the Slaves | Gilberto Freyre | Unknown |
| 1956 | Co-winner | A Manual of Intergroup Relations | John P. Dean | Unknown |
| 1956 | Co-winner | They Wait in Darkness | George W. Shepherd Jr. | Unknown |
| 1955 | Co-winner | Cultural Differences and Medical Care | Lyle Saunders | Unknown |
| 1955 | Co-winner | Report on Africa | Oden Meeker | Unknown |
| 1954 | Winner | Struggle for Africa | Vernon Bartlett | Unknown |
| 1953 | Co-winner | A Many-Splendored Thing | Han Suyin | Unknown |
| 1953 | Co-winner | People of the Deer | Farley Mowat | Unknown |
| 1952 | Co-winner | Race Relations | Brewton Berry | Unknown |
| 1952 | Co-winner | Venture to the Interior | Laurens van der Post | Unknown |
| 1951 | Winner | Twilight in South Africa | Henry Gibbs | Unknown |
| 1950 | Co-winner | Punishment Without Crime | S. Andhil Fineberg | Unknown |
| 1950 | Co-winner | Your Most Humble Servant | Shirley Graham | Unknown |
| 1949 | Winner | Anatomy of Paradise | J.C. Furnas | Unknown |
| 1948 | Winner | The Indians of the Americas | John Collier | Unknown |
| 1947 | Winner | Latin Americans in Texas | Pauline R. Kibbe | Unknown |
| 1946 | Co-winner | Black Metropolis | St. Clair Drake | Unknown |
| 1946 | Co-winner | One Nation | Wallace Stegner with the Editors of Look | Unknown |
| 1945 | Winner | An American Dilemma | Gunnar Myrdal | Unknown |
| 1944 | Co-winner | New World A-Coming | Roi Ottley | Unknown |
| 1944 | Co-winner | The World of Sholom Aleichem | Maurice Samuel | Unknown |
| 1943 | Winner | Dust Tracks on a Road | Zora Neale Hurston | Unknown |
| 1942 | Co-winner | Quest | Leopold Infeld | Unknown |
| 1942 | Co-winner | The Haitian People | James G. Leyburn | Unknown |
| 1941 | Winner | From Many Lands | Louis Adamic | Unknown |
| 1940 | Winner | The Negro Family in the United States | E. Franklin Frazier | Unknown |
| 1939 | Co-winner | Non-European Peoples of South Africa | Ralph J. Bunche | Unknown |
| 1939 | Co-winner | The Negro College Graduate | Charles S. Johnson | Unknown |
| 1937 | Winner | We Europeans | Julian Huxley | Unknown |
| 1936 | Winner | Negro Politicians | Harold F. Gosnell | Unknown |