| 2026 | Winner | Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City | Bench Ansfield | W. W. Norton |
| 2025 | Winner | Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War | Jon Grinspan | Unknown |
| 2024 | Winner | The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence | David Waldstreicher | Unknown |
| 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 | Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America | Nicole Eustace | Liveright |
| 2021 | Winner | In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History | Christopher Tomlins | Unknown |
| 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 | Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom | David W. Blight | Simon & Schuster |
| 2018 | Winner | Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers & Slaves in the Age of Jackson | Christina Snyder | Unknown |
| 2017 | Winner | Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary | Joe Jackson | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2016 | Winner | American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam | Christine Leigh Heyrman | Unknown |
| 2015 | Winner | Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality | Danielle Allen | Liveright |
| 2014 | Winner | A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination | Philip Shenon | Unknown |
| 2013 | Winner | Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam | Fredrik Logevall | Random House |
| 2012 | Winner | Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America | Richard White | W. W. Norton |
| 2011 | Winner | Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class | Jefferson Cowie | The New Press |
| 2010 | Winner | Cheever: A Life | Blake Bailey | Vintage Books |
| 2009 | Winner | On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape | Jared Farmer | Unknown |
| 2008 | Winner | FDR | Jean Edward Smith | Unknown |
| 2007 | Winner | Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 | John H. Elliott | Unknown |
| 2006 | Winner | The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism | Megan Marshall | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2005 | Winner | Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930 | Alan Trachtenberg | Unknown |
| 2004 | Winner | A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial | Suzanne Lebsock | Unknown |
| 2003 | Winner | Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands | James F. Brooks | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2002 | Winner | The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America | Louis Menand | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2001 | Winner | Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 | Fred Anderson | Knopf |
| 2000 | Winner | Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 | David M. Kennedy | Oxford University Press |
| 1999 | Winner | The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado | Elliott West | Unknown |
| 1998 | Winner | Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America | John M. Barry | Unknown |
| 1997 | Winner | Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War | Drew Gilpin Faust | Unknown |
| 1996 | Winner | Emerson: The Mind on Fire | Robert D. Richardson, Jr. | University of California Press |
| 1995 | Winner | The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America | John Putnam Demos | Vintage Books |
| 1994 | Winner | W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 | David Levering Lewis | Henry Holt |
| 1993 | Winner | Truman | David McCullough | Simon & Schuster |
| 1992 | Winner | The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 | Richard White | Cambridge University Press |
| 1991 | Winner | A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century | Paul E. Hoffman | Unknown |
| 1990 | Winner | A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt | Geoffrey C. Ward | Harper & Row |
| 1989 | Winner | Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 | Eric Foner | HarperCollins |
| 1988 | Winner | Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War | Eric Larrabee | Unknown |
| 1987 | Winner | A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture | Michael G. Kammen | Unknown |
| 1986 | Winner | Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States | Kenneth T. Jackson | Oxford University Press |
| 1985 | Winner | The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation | Joel Williamson | Oxford University Press |
| 1984 | Winner | Changes in the Land, Revised Edition: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England | William Cronon | Unknown |
| 1983 | Winner | Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 | John R. Stilgoe | Unknown |
| 1982 | Winner | Grant: A Biography | William S. McFeely | W. W. Norton |
| 1981 | Winner | A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 | Charles Royster | Unknown |
| 1980 | Winner | Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery | Leon F. Litwack | Knopf |
| 1979 | Winner | The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire | R. David Edmunds | Unknown |
| 1978 | Winner | The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 | David McCullough | Simon & Schuster |
| 1977 | Winner | World of Our Fathers | Irving Howe | Unknown |
| 1976 | Winner | American Slavery–American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia | Edmund Morgan | W. W. Norton |
| 1975 | Winner | The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York | Robert A. Caro | Random House Canada |
| 1974 | Winner | Stephen A. Douglas | Robert W. Johannsen | Unknown |
| 1973 | Winner | FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 | Kenneth S. Davis | Unknown |
| 1972 | Winner | Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers | Joseph P. Lash | W. W. Norton |
| 1971 | Winner | Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 1940-1945 | James MacGregor Burns | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich |
| 1970 | Winner | The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941 | Theodore A. Wilson | Unknown |
| 1969 | Winner | White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 | Winthrop D. Jordan | University of North Carolina Press |
| 1967 | Winner | Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West | William H. Goetzmann | Unknown |
| 1966 | Winner | The Americans: The National Experience | Daniel J. Boorstin | Unknown |
| 1965 | Winner | Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment | Willie Lee Nichols Rose | Oxford University Press |
| 1964 | Winner | Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal | William Leuchtenburg | Unknown |
| 1963 | Winner | That Wilder Image: The Painting of America's Native School from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer | James Thomas Flexner | Unknown |
| 1962 | Winner | Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century's Turn | Leon Wolff | Unknown |
| 1961 | Winner | Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson | Elting E. Morison | Unknown |
| 1960 | Winner | Edison: A Biography | Matthew Josephson | Unknown |
| 1959 | Winner | Henry Adams: The Middle Years | Ernest Samuels | 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 |