| 2025 | Winner | Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank | Justene Hill Edwards | Columbia University Press |
| 2025 | Finalist | American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism | Keidrick Roy | Princeton University Press |
| 2025 | Finalist | Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England | Gloria McCahon Whiting | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 2025 | Finalist | Slavery, Resistance, and Identity in Early Modern West Africa: The Ethnic-State of Gajaaga | Makhroufi Ousmane Traoré | Cambridge University Press |
| 2024 | Co-winner | Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution | Marlene L. Daut | Unknown |
| 2024 | Co-winner | Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World | Sara E. Johnson | Unknown |
| 2024 | Finalist | Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans | Emily A. Owens | Unknown |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family | Kerri K. Greenidge | Liveright |
| 2023 | Co-winner | Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London | Simon P. Newman | Unknown |
| 2023 | Co-winner | Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom | R. Isabela Morales | Unknown |
| 2023 | Finalist | Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South | David Silkenat | 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 | Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic | Jennifer L. Morgan | Unknown |
| 2022 | Finalist | The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South | Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh | Unknown |
| 2021 | Co-winner | Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast | Marjoleine Kars | The New Press |
| 2021 | Co-winner | Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War | Vincent Brown | Belknap Press |
| 2021 | Finalist | Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World | Jessica Marie Johnson | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 2020 | Winner | Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana | Sophie White | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2020 | Finalist | A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship | Keila Grinberg | Unknown |
| 2020 | Finalist | Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence | Kellie Carter Jackson | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 2020 | Finalist | They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South | Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers | Yale University Press |
| 2019 | Winner | Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps | Amy Murrell Taylor | Unknown |
| 2019 | Finalist | A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica | Brooke N. Newman | Yale University Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom | Jessica A. Krug | Unknown |
| 2018 | Co-winner | Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge | Erica Armstrong Dunbar | 37 Ink |
| 2018 | Co-winner | The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits | Tiya Miles | The New Press |
| 2018 | Finalist | Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade | Sharla M. Fett | Unknown |
| 2018 | Finalist | The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation | Daina Ramey Berry | Beacon Press |
| 2017 | Winner | The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition | Manisha Sinha | Yale University Press |
| 2017 | Finalist | Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions | Rashauna Johnson | Cambridge University Press |
| 2017 | Finalist | University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War | Alfred L. Brophy | Oxford University Press |
| 2016 | Winner | Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South | Jeff Forret | LSU Press |
| 2016 | Finalist | Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844 | Aisha K. Finch | Unknown |
| 2016 | Finalist | Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire | Matthew S. Hopper | Yale University Press |
| 2015 | Winner | Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution | Ada Ferrer | Cambridge University Press |
| 2015 | Finalist | Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World | Michael Guasco | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 2015 | Finalist | William Wells Brown: An African American Life | Ezra Greenspan | Unknown |
| 2014 | Winner | Word By Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing | Christopher Hager | Harvard University Press |
| 2014 | Finalist | Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro | Camillia Cowling | Unknown |
| 2014 | Finalist | The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 | Alan Taylor | W. W. Norton |
| 2013 | Winner | To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker | Sydney Nathans | Unknown |
| 2013 | Finalist | Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous & Atlantic Slaveries in New France | Brett Rushforth | Unknown |
| 2013 | Finalist | More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 | Stephen Kantrowitz | Penguin Press |
| 2012 | Winner | Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World | James H. Sweet | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2012 | Finalist | Black Gotham: A Family History of Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City | Carla L. Peterson | Yale University Press |
| 2012 | Finalist | John Brown Still Lives: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change | R. Blakeslee Gilpin | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2012 | Finalist | The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights | Robin Blackburn | Unknown |
| 2011 | Winner | Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South | Stephanie McCurry | Harvard University Press |
| 2011 | Finalist | Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America | Christina Snyder | Harvard University Press |
| 2011 | Finalist | The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation, and British Society at the End of Slavery | Nicolas Draper | Unknown |
| 2010 | Co-winner | In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World | Judith A. Carney, Richard Nicholas Rosomoff | Unknown |
| 2010 | Co-winner | Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery | Siddharth Kara | Unknown |
| 2010 | Finalist | John Brown’s War Against Slavery | Robert E. McGlone | Cambridge University Press |
| 2009 | Winner | The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family | Annette Gordon-Reed | W. W. Norton |
| 2009 | Finalist | Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household | Thavolia Glymph | Cambridge University Press |
| 2009 | Finalist | Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War | Jacqueline Jones | Vintage Books |
| 2008 | Winner | Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora | Stephanie E. Smallwood | Harvard University Press |
| 2008 | Finalist | Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South | Anthony E. Kaye | Unknown |
| 2008 | Finalist | Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900 | Kristin Mann | Indiana University Press |
| 2008 | Finalist | What this Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War | Chandra Manning | Knopf |
| 2007 | Winner | Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism | Christopher Brown | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2007 | Finalist | Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Freedom | Cassandra Pybus | Beacon Press |
| 2007 | Finalist | The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery | Matt D. Childs | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2006 | Winner | Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery | Rebecca J. Scott | Harvard University Press |
| 2006 | Finalist | Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life | Steven Deyle | Oxford University Press |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820-1860 | Richard Follett | LSU Press |
| 2005 | Winner | A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 | Laurent Dubois | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2005 | Finalist | Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War | Melvin Ely | Knopf |
| 2005 | Finalist | Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’ 1727-1892 | Robin Law | Ohio University Press |
| 2005 | Finalist | The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia | Claude A. Clegg III | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2005 | Finalist | The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons and Speech | Shane White, Graham White | Beacon Press |
| 2004 | Winner | Harriet Jacobs: A Life | Jean Fagan Yellin | Basic Books |
| 2004 | Finalist | A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration | Steven Hahn | Belknap Press |
| 2004 | Finalist | for Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 | John Wood Sweet | Unknown |
| 2004 | Finalist | Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 | James H. Sweet | Unknown |
| 2003 | Co-winner | Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands | James F. Brooks | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2003 | Co-winner | The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation | Seymour Drescher | Oxford University Press |
| 2002 | Co-winner | The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race | John Stauffer | Harvard University Press |
| 2002 | Co-winner | The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade | Robert W. Harms | Basic Books |
| 2001 | Winner | Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory | David W. Blight | Harvard University Press |
| 2000 | Winner | The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas | David Eltis | Cambridge University Press |
| 1999 | Co-winner | Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America | Ira Berlin | Harvard University Press |
| 1999 | Co-winner | Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry | Philip D. Morgan | University of North Carolina Press |
| 1999 | Finalist | From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation | Amy Dru Stanley | Unknown |
| 1999 | Finalist | Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 | Robert Olwell | Unknown |
| 1999 | Finalist | Stylin’: African-American Expressive Culture, from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit | Shane White, Graham White | Cornell University Press |
| 1999 | Finalist | The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement | Julie Roy Jeffrey | University of North Carolina Press |