| 2026 | Winner | Righteous Strife: How Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union | Richard Carwardine | Unknown |
| 2025 | Winner | Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War | Edda L. Fields-Black | Oxford University Press |
| 2024 | Winner | Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era | Frances M. Clarke, Rebecca Jo Plant | Unknown |
| 2024 | Finalist | Freedom’s Crescent: The Civil War and the Destruction of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley | John C. Rodrigue | Unknown |
| 2024 | Finalist | On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain | Ronald C. White | Unknown |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union | Frank J. Cirillo | Unknown |
| 2024 | Finalist | War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War | Yael A. Sternhell | Unknown |
| 2023 | Co-winner | A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House | Jonathan W. White | Unknown |
| 2023 | Co-winner | And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle | Jon Meacham | Unknown |
| 2023 | Finalist | Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life | Elizabeth D. Leonard | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2023 | Finalist | I Can’t Wait to Call You My Wife: African American Letters of Love and Family in the Civil War Era | Rita Roberts | Unknown |
| 2023 | Finalist | Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War | Roger Lowenstein | Unknown |
| 2022 | Winner | Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee's Army after Appomattox | Caroline E. Janney | Unknown |
| 2022 | Finalist | A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era | Andrew F. Lang | Unknown |
| 2022 | Finalist | Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers | John M. Sacher | LSU Press |
| 2022 | Finalist | I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land | Alaina Roberts | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 2022 | Finalist | The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution | James Oakes | Unknown |
| 2022 | Finalist | Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction | Kate Masur | W. W. Norton |
| 2022 | Finalist | West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire | Kevin Waite | Unknown |
| 2021 | Winner | Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times | David S. Reynolds | Unknown |
| 2021 | Finalist | Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World | Adrian Brettle | Unknown |
| 2021 | Finalist | South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War | Alice Baumgartner | Basic Books |
| 2021 | Finalist | The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War | Kenneth W. Noe | Unknown |
| 2021 | Finalist | The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation | Thavolia Glymph | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2020 | Winner | Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War | Elizabeth R. Varon | Unknown |
| 2020 | Finalist | Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America | Matthew Fox-Amato | Unknown |
| 2020 | Finalist | Girl in Black and White: The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement | Jessie Morgan-Owens | Unknown |
| 2020 | Finalist | Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery | Joseph P. Reidy | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2020 | Finalist | Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War | David Silkenat | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2020 | Finalist | Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America | W. Caleb McDaniel | Oxford University Press |
| 2020 | Finalist | The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution | Eric Foner | W. W. Norton |
| 2020 | Finalist | They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South | Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers | Yale University Press |
| 2019 | Winner | Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom | David W. Blight | Simon & Schuster |
| 2019 | Finalist | Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South | Diane Miller Sommerville | Unknown |
| 2019 | Finalist | Becoming Lincoln | William W. Freehling | University of Virginia Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery | Richard J. M Blackett | Unknown |
| 2019 | Finalist | The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War | Joanne B. Freeman | Unknown |
| 2018 | Winner | The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America | Edward L. Ayers | Viking |
| 2018 | Finalist | Be Free or Die: The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls' Escape from Slavery to Union Hero | Cate Lineberry | Picador |
| 2018 | Finalist | Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century | Tera Hunter | Unknown |
| 2018 | Finalist | Grant | Ron Chernow | Penguin Press |
| 2018 | Finalist | Making an Antislavery Nation Lincoln, Douglas and the Battle over Freedom | Graham A. Peck | Unknown |
| 2018 | Finalist | On to Petersburg: Grant and Lee, June 4-15, 1864 | Rhea Gordon | Unknown |
| 2018 | Finalist | The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846–1865 | Adam I. P. Smith | Unknown |
| 2017 | Co-winner | Lincoln’s White House: The People’s House in Wartime | James B. Conroy | Rowman and Littlefield |
| 2017 | Co-winner | Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America | Douglas R. Egerton | Unknown |
| 2017 | Finalist | A More Civil War: How the Union Waged a Just War | D. H. Dilbeck | Unknown |
| 2017 | Finalist | Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War | Chandra Manning | Unknown |
| 2017 | Finalist | Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed | Charles B. Strozier | Unknown |
| 2017 | Honorable mention | Herndon on Lincoln: Letters | Douglas L. Wilson, Rodney O. Davis | University of Illinois Press |
| 2016 | Winner | Mourning Lincoln | Martha Hodes | Unknown |
| 2016 | Finalist | Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness | Earl J. Hess | LSU Press |
| 2016 | Finalist | Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad | Eric Foner | Oxford University Press |
| 2016 | Finalist | Lincoln and Shakespeare | Michael Anderegg | University Press of Kansas |
| 2016 | Finalist | Lincoln and the Jews: A History | Jonathan D. Sarna, Benjamin Shapell | New York University Press |
| 2016 | Finalist | Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History | Richard Wightman Fox | W. W. Norton |
| 2016 | Finalist | Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American | John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, Celeste-Marie Bernier | Unknown |
| 2015 | Winner | Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion | Harold Holzer | Simon & Schuster |
| 2015 | Finalist | Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln | Jonathan W. White | LSU Press |
| 2015 | Finalist | Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln | Richard Brookhiser | Unknown |
| 2015 | Finalist | Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln’s Image | Joshua Zeitz | Unknown |
| 2015 | Finalist | Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865 | James B. Conroy | Unknown |
| 2015 | Finalist | With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era | William Blair | Unknown |
| 2014 | Co-winner | Gettysburg: The Last Invasion | Allen C. Guelzo | Unknown |
| 2014 | Co-winner | Writing the Gettysburg Address | Martin P. Johnson | University Press of Kansas |
| 2014 | Finalist | Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War | Margaret Humphreys | Unknown |
| 2014 | Finalist | Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Future of Latin America | Robert E. May | Cambridge University Press |
| 2014 | Finalist | The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On | John Stauffer, Benjamin Soskis | Oxford University Press |
| 2014 | Finalist | Word By Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing | Christopher Hager | Harvard University Press |
| 2013 | Winner | Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States,1861–1865 | James Oakes | Unknown |
| 2013 | Finalist | More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 | Stephen Kantrowitz | Penguin Press |
| 2013 | Finalist | Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South | Yael A. Sternhell | Unknown |
| 2012 | Co-winner | Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union | William C. Harris | University Press of Kansas |
| 2012 | Co-winner | Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky | Elizabeth D. Leonard | Unknown |
| 2012 | Honorable mention | The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic | Barbara A. Gannon | Unknown |
| 2011 | Winner | The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery | Eric Foner | W. W. Norton |
| 2011 | Honorable mention | An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C | Kate Masur | Unknown |
| 2011 | Honorable mention | Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations | Howard Jones | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2011 | Honorable mention | Border War: Fighting Over Slavery Before the Civil War | Stanley Harrold | Unknown |
| 2011 | Honorable mention | Financial Fraud and the Guerilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861–1865 | Mark W. Geiger | Unknown |
| 2011 | Honorable mention | Reading with Lincoln | Robert Bray | Unknown |
| 2011 | Honorable mention | The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor and Manhood in the Union Army | Lorien Foote | Unknown |
| 2010 | Winner | Abraham Lincoln: A Life | Michael Burlingame | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| 2010 | Finalist | A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction | Mark Wahlgren Summers | Unknown |
| 2010 | Finalist | John Brown’s War Against Slavery | Robert E. McGlone | Cambridge University Press |
| 2009 | Co-winner | Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War | Craig Symonds | Oxford University Press |
| 2009 | Co-winner | Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief | James McPherson | Unknown |
| 2009 | Honorable mention | Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer | Fred Kaplan | Unknown |
| 2009 | Honorable mention | President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman | William Lee Miller | Unknown |
| 2009 | Honorable mention | Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War | Jacqueline Jones | Vintage Books |
| 2008 | Co-winner | Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters | Elizabeth Brown Pryor | Unknown |
| 2008 | Co-winner | The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics | James Oakes | Unknown |
| 2008 | Finalist | Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961–1965 | Robert Cooke | Unknown |
| 2008 | Honorable mention | What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War | Chandra Manning | Knopf |
| 2007 | Winner | Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words | Douglas L. Wilson | Knopf |
| 2007 | Finalist | The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century | Martha Hodes | Unknown |
| 2007 | Finalist | Upon the Alter of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War | Harry S. Stout | Unknown |
| 2006 | Winner | Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln | Doris Kearns Goodwin | Simon & Schuster |
| 2006 | Finalist | Nothing But Victory: The Army of Tennessee 1961–1865 | Steven Woodworth | Unknown |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through his Words | Ronald White | Unknown |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln | Sean Wilentz | W. W. Norton |
| 2006 | Honorable mention | Harvard’s Civil War: A History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry | Richard F. Miller | Unknown |
| 2006 | Honorable mention | The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History - Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War’s Defining Battle | Margaret Creighton | Basic Books |
| 2006 | Honorable mention | The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835–1864 | Carol Bundy | Unknown |
| 2005 | Winner | Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation | Allen C. Guelzo | Simon & Schuster |
| 2005 | Finalist | Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South | Jonathan D. Martin | Unknown |
| 2005 | Finalist | Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President | Harold Holzer | Simon & Schuster |
| 2005 | Finalist | Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America | Jane A. Schultz | Unknown |
| 2004 | Winner | Lincoln | Richard J. Carwardine | Unknown |
| 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 | Honorable mention | The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant | John Y. Simon | Unknown |
| 2003 | Winner | Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! | George C. Rable | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2003 | Finalist | The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race | John Stauffer | Harvard University Press |
| 2003 | Honorable mention | Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860–1890 | Michael Fitzgerald | Unknown |
| 2002 | Winner | Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory | David W. Blight | Harvard University Press |
| 2002 | Honorable mention | The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861–1865 | Alice Fahs | Unknown |
| 2002 | Honorable mention | The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln | Kenneth J. Winkle | Unknown |
| 2001 | Winner | A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861–1865 | Russell F. Weigley | Unknown |
| 2001 | Finalist | The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 | Leonard L. Richards | Unknown |
| 2001 | Finalist | This Astounding Close Road to Bennett Place | Mark L. Bradley | Unknown |
| 2000 | Co-winner | Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President | Allen C. Guelzo | Oxford University Press |
| 2000 | Co-winner | Runaway Slaves: Rebels in the Plantation | John Hope Franklin, Loren Schweninger | Unknown |
| 2000 | Finalist | The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War | Michael Holt | Oxford University Press |
| 1999 | Winner | Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln | Douglas L. Wilson | Unknown |
| 1999 | Finalist | Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia, from the Wilderness to Appomattox | J. Tracy Power | Unknown |
| 1998 | Winner | For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War | Jim McPherson | Unknown |
| 1998 | Finalist | With Charity For All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union | William C. Harris | Unknown |
| 1998 | Honorable mention | Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend | James Robertson, Jr. | Unknown |
| 1998 | Honorable mention | The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave off Defeat | Gary Gallagher | Unknown |
| 1997 | Winner | Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s | Don Fehrenbacher | Unknown |
| 1997 | Winner | The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics | Don E. Fehrenbacher | Unknown |
| 1996 | Winner | Lincoln | David Donald | Unknown |
| 1996 | Finalist | Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman | Michael Fellman | Unknown |
| 1996 | Finalist | The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians 1861–1865 | Mark Grimsley | Unknown |
| 1995 | Winner | The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln | Phillip Shaw Paludan | University Press of Kansas |
| 1995 | Finalist | Andersonville: The Last Depot | William Marvel | Unknown |
| 1995 | Finalist | Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge | Charles B. Dew | Unknown |
| 1994 | Winner | Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War | Ira Berlin, Barbara Fields, Steven Miller, Joseph Reidy, Leslie Rowland | Unknown |
| 1994 | Finalist | The Shadows Rise: Abraham Lincoln and the Anne Rutledge Legend | John Evangelist Walsh | Unknown |
| 1994 | Finalist | The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home | Reid Mitchell | Oxford University Press |
| 1994 | Finalist | Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy | Winthrop D. Jordan | LSU Press |
| 1993 | Winner | The Peculiar Institution | Kenneth Stampp | Vintage Books |
| 1993 | Finalist | Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 | Albert Castel | University Press of Kansas |
| 1993 | Finalist | Joseph E. Johnston, A Civil War Biography | Craig L. Symonds | Unknown |
| 1993 | Finalist | Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order | John F. Marszalek | Unknown |
| 1992 | Co-winner | Frederick Douglass | William S. McFeely | W. W. Norton |
| 1992 | Co-winner | The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans | Charles Royster | Knopf |
| 1992 | Finalist | Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861–1867: Series I, Volume III, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South | Ira Berlin | Unknown |
| 1991 | Finalist | Mother May You Never See The Sights I Have Seen: The Fifty-Seventh Massachusetts Veteran Volunteers in the Last Year of the Civil War | Warren Wilkinson | Unknown |
| 1991 | Finalist | The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties | Mark E. Neely, Jr. | Oxford University Press |