| 2026 | Winner | John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law | Beth Lew-Williams | Harvard University Press |
| 2026 | Winner | Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States | Emilie Connolly | Princeton University Press |
| 2025 | Winner | Native Nations: A Millennium in North America | Kathleen DuVal | Random House |
| 2025 | Winner | A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America | James Tejani | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2024 | Winner | Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia | Carolyn Woods Eisenberg | Oxford University Press |
| 2024 | Winner | Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion | Elliott West | University of Nebraska Press |
| 2023 | Winner | Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands | Kelly Lytle Hernández | W. W. Norton |
| 2023 | Winner | G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century | Beverly Gage | Viking |
| 2023 | Winner | The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America | John Wood Sweet | Henry Holt and Company |
| 2022 | Winner | The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics | Mae Ngai | W. W. Norton |
| 2022 | Winner | Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance | Mia Bay | Harvard University Press |
| 2021 | Winner | Unworthy Republic: The dispossession of Native Americans and the road to Indian Territory | Claudio Saunt | W. W. Norton |
| 2021 | Winner | Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 | Andy Horowitz | Harvard University Press |
| 2020 | Winner | Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age | Lizabeth Cohen | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2020 | Winner | Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery | Joseph P. Reidy | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2019 | Winner | Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom | David W. Blight | Simon & Schuster |
| 2019 | Winner | Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War | Lisa Brooks | Yale University Press |
| 2018 | Winner | God's Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America | Louis S. Warren | Basic Books |
| 2018 | Winner | Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England | Douglas L. Winiarski | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2018 | Winner | Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945 | Waldo Heinrichs, Marc Gallicchio | Oxford University Press |
| 2017 | Winner | Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy | Heather Ann Thompson | Pantheon |
| 2017 | Winner | Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers | Nancy Tomes | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2017 | Winner | The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America | Andrés Reséndez | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2016 | Winner | The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast | Andrew Lipman | Yale University Press |
| 2016 | Winner | Border Law: The First Seminole War and American Nationhood | Deborah A. Rosen | Harvard University Press |
| 2016 | Winner | Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention | Mary Sarah Bilder | Harvard University Press |
| 2015 | Winner | Empire of Cotton: A Global History | Sven Beckert | Penguin Books |
| 2015 | Winner | The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World | Greg Grandin | Metropolitan Books |
| 2014 | Winner | A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek | Ari Kelman | Harvard University Press |
| 2014 | Winner | Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time | Ira Katznelson | Liveright |
| 2013 | Winner | Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History | John Fabian Witt | Simon & Schuster |
| 2013 | Winner | The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail | W. Jeffrey Bolster | Harvard University Press |
| 2012 | Winner | Age of Fracture | Daniel T. Rodgers | Harvard University Press |
| 2012 | Winner | Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement | Tomiko Brown-Nagin | Oxford University Press |
| 2012 | Winner | Empires, Nations & Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 | Anne F. Hyde | University of Nebraska Press |
| 2011 | Winner | Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America | Christopher Tomlins | Cambridge University Press |
| 2011 | Winner | Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America | Sara Dubow | Oxford University Press |
| 2011 | Winner | The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery | Eric Foner | W. W. Norton |
| 2010 | Winner | Abigail Adams | Woody Holton | Simon & Schuster |
| 2010 | Winner | Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits | Linda Gordon | W. W. Norton |
| 2010 | Winner | White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 | Margaret D. Jacobs | University of Nebraska Press |
| 2009 | Winner | Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War | Thomas G. Andrews | Harvard University Press |
| 2009 | Winner | The Comanche Empire | Pekka Hämäläinen | Yale University Press |
| 2009 | Winner | This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | Drew Gilpin Faust | Vintage Books |
| 2008 | Winner | Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America | Peter Silver | W. W. Norton |
| 2008 | Winner | The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America | Allan Brandt | Basic Books |
| 2008 | Winner | The Populist Vision | Charles Postel | Oxford University Press |
| 2007 | Winner | Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South | Jack Temple Kirby | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2007 | Winner | William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism | Robert D. Richardson | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2006 | Winner | Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic | Erskine Clarke | Yale University Press |
| 2006 | Winner | The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times | Odd Arne Westad | Cambridge University Press |
| 2006 | Winner | The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln | Sean Wilentz | W. W. Norton |
| 2005 | Winner | Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 | Michael O’Brien | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2005 | Winner | From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality | Michael J. Klarman | Oxford University Press |
| 2005 | Winner | Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War | Melvin Ely | Knopf |
| 2004 | Winner | A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration | Steven Hahn | Belknap Press |
| 2004 | Winner | In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 | Edward L. Ayers | W. W. Norton |
| 2004 | Winner | Jonathan Edwards: A Life | George M. Marsden | Yale University Press |
| 2003 | Winner | Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands | James F. Brooks | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2003 | Winner | The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 | Alan Gallay | Yale University Press |
| 2002 | Winner | In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America | Alice Kessler-Harris | Oxford University Press |
| 2002 | Winner | Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory | David W. Blight | Harvard University Press |
| 2001 | Winner | Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush | Susan Lee Johnson | W. W. Norton |
| 2001 | Winner | The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst | David Nasaw | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2000 | Winner | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | John W. Dower | The New Press |
| 2000 | Winner | Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier | James H. Merrell | W. W. Norton |
| 2000 | Winner | The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction | Linda Gordon | Harvard University Press |
| 1999 | Winner | Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America | Ira Berlin | Harvard University Press |
| 1999 | Winner | Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry | Philip D. Morgan | University of North Carolina Press |
| 1999 | Winner | The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity | Jill Lepore | Knopf |
| 1998 | Winner | Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt | Christine Leigh Heyrman | Knopf |
| 1998 | Winner | The Clash: A History of U.S.-Japan Relations | Walter LaFeber | W. W. Norton |
| 1998 | Winner | The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit | Thomas J. Sugrue | Princeton University Press |
| 1997 | Winner | Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776-1995 | David E. Kyvig | University Press of Kansas |
| 1997 | Winner | Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 | James T. Patterson | Oxford University Press |
| 1996 | Winner | Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography | David S. Reynolds | Knopf |
| 1996 | Winner | William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic | Alan Taylor | Knopf |
| 1995 | Winner | Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi | John Dittmer | University of Illinois Press |
| 1995 | Winner | The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 | John L. Brooke | Cambridge University Press |
| 1994 | Winner | The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 | Stanley Elkins, Eric McKitrick | Oxford University Press |
| 1994 | Winner | Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy | Winthrop D. Jordan | LSU Press |
| 1994 | Winner | W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 | David Levering Lewis | Henry Holt |
| 1993 | Winner | A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War | Melvyn P. Leffler | Stanford University Press |
| 1993 | Winner | Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life; Volume I: The Private Years | Charles Capper | Oxford University Press |
| 1992 | Winner | Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West | William Cronon | W. W. Norton |
| 1992 | Winner | The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans | Charles Royster | Knopf |
| 1991 | Winner | A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 | Laurel Thatcher Ulrich | Knopf |
| 1991 | Winner | Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 | Lizabeth Cohen | Cambridge University Press |
| 1990 | Winner | Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow | Neil R. McMillen | University of Illinois Press |
| 1990 | Winner | The Indians' New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal | James H. Merrell | University of North Carolina Press |
| 1989 | Winner | Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America | Edmund S. Morgan | W. W. Norton |
| 1989 | Winner | Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 | Eric Foner | HarperCollins |
| 1988 | Winner | The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon | Michael S. Sherry | Yale University Press |
| 1988 | Winner | Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom | Peter Kolchin | Harvard University Press |
| 1987 | Winner | A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia | Thomas Doerflinger | University of North Carolina Press |
| 1987 | Winner | Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900 | Roger Lane | Harvard University Press |
| 1986 | Winner | Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States | Kenneth T. Jackson | Oxford University Press |
| 1986 | Winner | Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present | Jacqueline Jones | Basic Books |
| 1985 | Winner | The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 | Suzanne Lebsock | W. W. Norton |
| 1985 | Winner | The Life and Times of Cotton Mather | Kenneth Silverman | Welcome Rain |
| 1984 | Winner | Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 | Louis R. Harlan | Oxford University Press |
| 1984 | Winner | The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry | Paul Starr | Basic Books |
| 1983 | Winner | Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England | John Putnam Demos | Oxford University Press |
| 1983 | Winner | Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist | Nick Salvatore | University of Illinois Press |
| 1982 | Winner | A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 | Edward Countryman | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| 1982 | Winner | Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 | Mary P. Ryan | Cambridge University Press |
| 1981 | Winner | Alice James: A Biography | Jean Strouse | New York Review Books |
| 1981 | Winner | Walter Lippmann and the American Century | Ronald Steel | Taylor & Francis |
| 1980 | Winner | Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s | Donald Worster | Oxford University Press |
| 1980 | Winner | Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 | Robert Dallek | Oxford University Press |
| 1980 | Winner | Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 | Thomas Dublin | Columbia University Press |
| 1979 | Winner | Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945 | Christopher Thorne | Oxford University Press |
| 1979 | Winner | Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution | Anthony F. C. Wallace | Knopf |
| 1978 | Winner | The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 | Morton J. Horwitz | Harvard University Press |
| 1978 | Winner | The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business | Alfred D. Chandler Jr. | Belknap Press |
| 1977 | Winner | Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn | Alan Dawley | Harvard University Press |
| 1977 | Winner | Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834 | Barry W. Higman | Cambridge University Press |
| 1977 | Winner | The Minutemen and Their World | Robert A. Gross | Hill and Wang |
| 1976 | Winner | Edith Wharton: A Biography | R. W. B. Lewis | Harper |
| 1976 | Winner | The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 | David Brion Davis | Cornell University Press |
| 1975 | Winner | Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice | Alexander L. George, Richard Smoke | Columbia University Press |
| 1975 | Winner | Roll, Jordan, Roll | Eugene Genovese | Pantheon |
| 1975 | Winner | Time on the Cross: Evidence and Methods—A Supplement | Robert William Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman | Little, Brown |
| 1974 | Winner | Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher | Ray Allen Billington | Oxford University Press |
| 1974 | Winner | The Devil and John Foster Dulles | Townsend Hoopes | Little, Brown |
| 1974 | Winner | The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 | Stephan Thernstrom | Harvard University Press |
| 1973 | Winner | Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 | Louis R. Harlan | Oxford University Press |
| 1973 | Winner | Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam | Frances FitzGerald | Little, Brown |
| 1973 | Winner | The United States and the Origins of the Cold War | John Lewis Gaddis | Columbia University Press |
| 1972 | Winner | Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States | Carl N. Degler | Macmillan |
| 1972 | Winner | The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages | Samuel Eliot Morison | Oxford University Press |
| 1972 | Winner | The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 | Robert Middlekauff | Oxford University Press |
| 1971 | Winner | Andrew Carnegie | Joseph Frazier Wall | Oxford University Press |
| 1971 | Winner | Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger | David M. Kennedy | Yale University Press |
| 1971 | Winner | The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, Volume III—From 1953 | Erik Barnouw | Oxford University Press |
| 1970 | Winner | Charles Wilson Peale | Charles Coleman Sellers | Simon & Schuster |
| 1970 | Winner | Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South | Dan T. Carter | LSU Press |
| 1970 | Winner | The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 | Gordon S. Wood | University of North Carolina Press |
| 1969 | Winner | The Brains Trust | Rexford Guy Tugwell | Viking |
| 1969 | Winner | White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 | Winthrop D. Jordan | University of North Carolina Press |
| 1969 | Winner | Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution | N. Gordon Levin Jr. | Oxford University Press |
| 1968 | Winner | A History of Negro Education in the South, from 1619 to the Present | Henry Allen Bullock | Harvard University Press |
| 1968 | Winner | From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 | Richard L. Bushman | Harvard University Press |
| 1968 | Winner | The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution | Bernard Bailyn | Harvard University Press |
| 1967 | Winner | James K. Polk, Continentalist, 1843-1846, Volume II | Charles Sellers | Princeton University Press |
| 1967 | Winner | Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 | William W. Freehling | HarperCollins |
| 1967 | Winner | The Washington Community, 1800-1828 | James Sterling Young | Columbia University Press |
| 1966 | Winner | Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1929-1946 | Theodore W. Friend III | Yale University Press |
| 1966 | Winner | The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence | Richard B. Morris | HarperCollins |
| 1965 | Winner | Castlereagh and Adams; England and the United States, 1812-1823 | Bradford Perkins | University of California Press |
| 1965 | Winner | Portrait of a General; Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence | William B. Willcox | Knopf |
| 1965 | Winner | The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938 | Dorothy Borg | Harvard University Press |
| 1964 | Winner | Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940 | William E. Leuchtenburg | HarperCollins |
| 1964 | Winner | Power, Freedom, and Diplomacy: The Foreign Policy Of the United States of America | Paul Seabury | Random House |
| 1964 | Winner | The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison | John L. Thomas | Little, Brown |
| 1963 | Winner | John Adams | Page Smith | Doubleday |
| 1963 | Winner | Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision | Roberta Wohlstetter | Stanford University Press |
| 1963 | Winner | The Might of Nations: World Politics in Our Time | John G. Stoessinger | Random House |
| 1962 | Winner | Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1866 | Martin B. Duberman | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 1962 | Winner | The Transformation of the School | Lawrence A. Cremin | Knopf |
| 1962 | Winner | To the Farewell Address; Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy | Felix Gilbert | Princeton University Press |
| 1961 | Winner | The Jefferson Image in the American Mind | Merrill D. Peterson | Oxford University Press |
| 1961 | Winner | Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality, 1914-1915 | Arthur S. Link | Unknown |
| 1960 | Winner | In the Days of McKinley | Margaret Leech | Harper & Brothers |
| 1960 | Winner | The Age of the Democratic Revolution: Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 | R. R. Palmer | Princeton University Press |
| 1959 | Winner | Henry Adams: The Middle Years | Ernest Samuels | Harvard University Press |
| 1959 | Winner | The Americans: The Colonial Experience | Daniel J. Boorstin | Random House |
| 1958 | Winner | A History of American Magazines, Volume IV | Frank Luther Mott | Harvard University Press |
| 1958 | Winner | The Crisis of the Old Order | Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 1957 | Winner | Russia Leaves the War: Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920 | George F. Kennan | Princeton University Press |
| 1957 | Winner | Wilson: the New Freedom | Arthur S. Link | Unknown |
| 1956 | Winner | Henry Adams | Elizabeth Stevenson | Macmillan |
| 1956 | Winner | Lincoln, the President: Last Full Measure | J. G. Randall, Richard N. Current | Dodd, Mead & Company |
| 1955 | Winner | Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History | Paul Horgan | Rinehart & Company |
| 1955 | Winner | The Jacksonians | Leonard D. White | Macmillan |
| 1954 | Winner | Seedtime of the Republic | Clinton Rossiter | Harcourt, Brace and Company |
| 1954 | Winner | The Undeclared War | William L. Langer, S. Everett Gleason | Harper & Brothers |
| 1953 | Winner | Rendezvous with Destiny | Eric F. Goldman | Knopf |
| 1953 | Winner | The Era of Good Feelings | George Dangerfield | Harcourt, Brace and Company |
| 1952 | Winner | Charles Evans Hughes | Merlo J. Pusey | Macmillan |
| 1952 | Winner | Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 | C. Vann Woodward | LSU Press |
| 1951 | Winner | Our More Perfect Union | Arthur N. Holcombe | Harvard University Press |
| 1951 | Winner | Virgin Land | Henry N. Smith | Harvard University Press |
| 1950 | Winner | Coronado | Herbert E. Bolton | University of New Mexico Press |
| 1950 | Winner | The Great War for the Empire | Lawrence H. Gipson | Knopf |
| 1949 | Winner | Roosevelt and Hopkins | Robert E. Sherwood | Harper & Brothers |
| 1949 | Winner | The Rising Sun in the Pacific | Samuel E. Morison | Little, Brown |
| 1948 | Winner | Across the Wide Missouri | Bernard DeVoto | Houghton Mifflin |
| 1948 | Winner | Ordeal of the Union | Allan Nevins | Scribner |