| 2025 | Winner | Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City | Bench Ansfield | W. W. Norton |
| 2025 | Finalist | High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America | Aaron G. Fountain Jr. | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2025 | Finalist | Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950 | Eli Erlick | Beacon Press |
| 2025 | Finalist | Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore | Char Adams | Tiny Reparations Books |
| 2025 | Finalist | Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters | Jennifer Clapp | MIT Press |
| 2024 | Winner | Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch | Andrea Freeman | Metropolitan Books |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America | Aaron Robertson | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports | Michael Waters | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2024 | Finalist | Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism | Joseph M. Thompson | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America | Andrew W. Kahrl | University of Chicago Press |
| 2023 | Winner | Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century | Joya Chatterji | Yale University Press |
| 2023 | Finalist | Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class | Blair L.M. Kelley | Liveright |
| 2023 | Finalist | Brooding Over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance | Nikki M. Taylor | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2023 | Finalist | The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History | Ned Blackhawk | Yale University Press |
| 2023 | Finalist | Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World | Malcolm Harris | Little, Brown |
| 2022 | Winner | By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners | Margaret A. Burnham | W. W. Norton |
| 2022 | Finalist | The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family | Kerri K. Greenidge | Liveright |
| 2022 | Finalist | Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America | Hugh Eakin | Crown |
| 2022 | Finalist | Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of our National Identity | Donald Yacovone | Pantheon |
| 2022 | Finalist | The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution | Andrew M. Wehrman | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| 2021 | Winner | The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics | Mae Ngai | W. W. Norton |
| 2021 | Winner | Cuba: An American History | Ada Ferrer | Scribner |
| 2021 | Finalist | African Europeans: An Untold History | Olivette Otele | Basic Books |
| 2021 | Finalist | Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance | Mia Bay | Harvard University Press |
| 2021 | Finalist | I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land | Alaina E. Roberts | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 2020 | Winner | South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War | Alice Baumgartner | Basic Books |
| 2020 | Winner | Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All | Martha S. Jones | Basic Books |
| 2020 | Finalist | The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States | Walter Johnson | Basic Books |
| 2020 | Finalist | The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, From Columbus to the Islamic State | David Vine | Metropolitan Books |
| 2020 | Finalist | The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants | Adam Goodman | Princeton University Press |
| 2019 | Winner | They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South | Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers | Yale University Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century | Charles King | Doubleday |
| 2019 | Finalist | The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present | David Treuer | Riverhead Books |
| 2019 | Finalist | The Cigarette: A Political History | Sarah Milov | Harvard University Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution | Toby Green | University of Chicago Press |
| 2018 | Winner | Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919–1945 | Julia Boyd | Pegasus Books |
| 2018 | Finalist | Empress | Ruby Lal | W. W. Norton |
| 2018 | Finalist | Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution | Priya Satia | Penguin Press |
| 2018 | Finalist | Scots & Catalans | J. H. Elliott | Yale University Press |
| 2018 | Finalist | The Browns of California | Miriam Pawel | Bloomsbury |
| 2017 | Winner | The Death and Life of the Great Lakes | Dan Egan | W. W. Norton |
| 2017 | Finalist | The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America | Richard Rothstein | Liveright |
| 2017 | Finalist | The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America | Frances FitzGerald | Simon & Schuster |
| 2017 | Finalist | London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City | Stephen Alford | Bloomsbury |
| 2017 | Finalist | Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam | Mark Bowden | Atlantic Monthly Press |
| 2016 | Winner | An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 | Benjamin Madley | Yale University Press |
| 2016 | Finalist | Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy | Heather Ann Thompson | Pantheon |
| 2016 | Finalist | White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America | Nancy Isenberg | Viking |
| 2016 | Finalist | Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 | Adam Hochschild | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2016 | Finalist | Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region | Masha Gessen | Schocken |
| 2015 | Winner | Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel | Dan Ephron | Unknown |
| 2015 | Finalist | Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope | Jonathan M. Bryant | Liveright |
| 2015 | Finalist | Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story | David Maraniss | Simon & Schuster |
| 2015 | Finalist | SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome | Mary Beard | W. W. Norton |
| 2015 | Finalist | This Gulf of Fire: The Destruction of Lisbon, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason | Mark Molesky | Knopf |
| 2014 | Winner | The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 | Adam Tooze | Penguin Press |
| 2014 | Finalist | Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War | Mark Harris | Canongate |
| 2014 | Finalist | The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution | Walter Isaacson | Simon & Schuster |
| 2014 | Finalist | The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London | Judith Flanders | Atlantic Books |
| 2014 | Finalist | Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin and Sadat at Camp David | Lawrence Wright | Vintage Books |
| 2013 | Winner | The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 | Christopher Clark | Allen Lane |
| 2013 | Finalist | FDR and the Jews | Richard Breitman, Allan J. Lichtman | Harvard University Press |
| 2013 | Finalist | The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism | Doris Kearns Goodwin | Simon & Schuster |
| 2013 | Finalist | The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 | Alan Taylor | W. W. Norton |
| 2013 | Finalist | The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend | Glenn Frankel | Bloomsbury |
| 2012 | Winner | America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union | Fergus M. Bordewich | Simon & Schuster |
| 2012 | Finalist | A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico | Amy S. Greenberg | Knopf |
| 2012 | Finalist | Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone | George Black | St. Martin's Press |
| 2012 | Finalist | Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty | John M. Barry | Penguin Books |
| 2012 | Finalist | Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party | Geoffrey Kabaservice | Oxford University Press |
| 2011 | Winner | Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America | Richard White | W. W. Norton |
| 2011 | Finalist | 1861: The Civil War Awakening | Adam Goodheart | Vintage Books |
| 2011 | Finalist | Molotov’s Magic Lantern: Travels in Russian History | Rachel Polonsky | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2011 | Finalist | The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination | Javier Cercas | Unknown |
| 2011 | Finalist | To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 | Adam Hochschild | HarperCollins |
| 2010 | Co-winner | Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq | John W. Dower | W. W. Norton |
| 2010 | Co-winner | Roosevelt’s Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party | Susan Dunn | Harvard University Press |
| 2010 | Co-winner | The Killing Of Crazy Horse | Thomas Powers | Vintage Books |
| 2010 | Co-winner | Washington: A Life | Ron Chernow | Penguin Books |
| 2010 | Co-winner | Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization | Steven Solomon | Harper |
| 2009 | Winner | Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance 1950–1963 | Kevin Starr | Oxford University Press |
| 2009 | Finalist | Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 | Gordon S. Wood | Oxford University Press |
| 2009 | Finalist | Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 | Amy Louise Wood | University of North Carolina Press |
| 2009 | Finalist | Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line | Martha A. Sandweiss | Penguin Press |
| 2009 | Finalist | The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science | Richard Holmes | HarperCollins |
| 2008 | Winner | Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe | Mark Mazower | Penguin Press |
| 2008 | Finalist | Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath | Rick Wartzman | PublicAffairs |
| 2008 | Finalist | One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War | Michael Dobbs | Vintage Books |
| 2008 | Finalist | Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North | Thomas J. Sugrue | Random House |
| 2008 | Finalist | This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | Drew Gilpin Faust | Vintage Books |
| 2007 | Winner | Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA | Tim Weiner | Doubleday |
| 2007 | Finalist | Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World | Margaret MacMillan | Random House |
| 2007 | Finalist | The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It | David A. Bell | Houghton Mifflin |
| 2007 | Finalist | The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow that Changed the Course of World War II | Andrew Nagorski | Simon & Schuster |
| 2007 | Finalist | Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England | Lynne Olson | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2006 | Winner | The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 | Lawrence Wright | Knopf |
| 2006 | Finalist | At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-1968 | Taylor Branch | Simon & Schuster |
| 2006 | Finalist | Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War | Nathaniel Philbrick | Viking |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai | John Tayman | Simon & Schuster |
| 2006 | Finalist | The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West | Niall Ferguson | Penguin Books |
| 2005 | Winner | Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves | Adam Hochschild | Houghton Mifflin |
| 2005 | Finalist | Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945 | Christopher Bayly, Tim Harper | Allen Lane |
| 2005 | Finalist | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Tony Judt | Penguin Books |
| 2005 | Finalist | The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln | Sean Wilentz | W. W. Norton |
| 2005 | Finalist | The Third Reich in Power: Volume 2 of The Third Reich Series | Richard J. Evans | Allen Lane |
| 2004 | Winner | Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism | Geoffrey R. Stone | W. W. Norton |
| 2004 | Finalist | Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farm Workers, 1769-1913 | Richard Steven Street | Unknown |
| 2004 | Finalist | High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis | Max Frankel | Unknown |
| 2004 | Finalist | Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier | Alfred F. Young | Knopf |
| 2004 | Finalist | The Coming of the Third Reich: Volume 1 of The Third Reich Series | Richard J. Evans | Penguin Books |
| 2003 | Winner | An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America | Henry Wiencek | Macmillan |
| 2003 | Finalist | Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps | Anne Applebaum | Doubleday |
| 2003 | Finalist | Homosexuality and Civilization | Louis Crompton | Harvard University Press |
| 2003 | Finalist | They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 | David Maraniss | Simon & Schuster |
| 2003 | Finalist | When the King Took Flight | Timothy Tackett | Harvard University Press |
| 2002 | Winner | Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East | Michael B. Oren | Oxford University Press |
| 2002 | Finalist | At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America | Philip Dray | Random House |
| 2002 | Finalist | Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller | Gregg Herken | Macmillan |
| 2002 | Finalist | In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 | Mary Beth Norton | Knopf |
| 2002 | Finalist | The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade | Robert W. Harms | Basic Books |
| 2001 | Winner | Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus | Rick Perlstein | Hill and Wang |
| 2001 | Finalist | France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 | Julian Jackson | Oxford University Press |
| 2001 | Finalist | The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America | Louis Menand | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2001 | Finalist | The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake | G.E. Bentley Jr. | Unknown |
| 2001 | Finalist | Venice: Lion City | Garry Wills | Simon & Schuster |
| 2000 | Winner | The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach | Alice Kaplan | University of Chicago Press |
| 2000 | Finalist | In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex | Nathaniel Philbrick | Penguin Books |
| 2000 | Finalist | Kosovo: War and Revenge | Tim Judah | Yale University Press |
| 2000 | Finalist | Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra | Shareen Blair Brysac | Oxford University Press |
| 2000 | Finalist | The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States | Alexander Keyssar | Basic Books |
| 1999 | Winner | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | John W. Dower | The New Press |
| 1999 | Finalist | Empire Express: Building the 1st Transcontinental Railroad | David Haward Bain | Viking |
| 1999 | Finalist | Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 | David M. Kennedy | Oxford University Press |
| 1999 | Finalist | The First World War | John Keegan | Pimlico |
| 1999 | Finalist | The Holocaust in American Life | Peter Novick | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1998 | Winner | The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity | Roy Porter | Fontana |
| 1998 | Finalist | Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture | Kathy Peiss | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1998 | Finalist | Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America | Ira Berlin | Harvard University Press |
| 1998 | Finalist | Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry | Philip D. Morgan | University of North Carolina Press |
| 1998 | Finalist | The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life | Nancy Tomes | Harvard University Press |
| 1997 | Winner | A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution | Orlando Figes | Jonathan Cape |
| 1997 | Finalist | Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village | Serge Schmemann | Vintage Books |
| 1997 | Finalist | Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West | Peter N. Stearns | New York University Press |
| 1997 | Finalist | Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1. The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 | Saul Friedländer | Harper Perennial |
| 1997 | Finalist | Sun Dancing: Life in a Medieval Irish Monastery and How Celtic Spirituality Influenced the World | Geoffrey Moorhouse | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 1996 | Winner | Black Sea | Neal Ascherson | Jonathan Cape |
| 1996 | Finalist | Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris | Richard Kluger | Knopf |
| 1996 | Finalist | Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California | Kevin Starr | Oxford University Press |
| 1996 | Finalist | Europe: A History | Norman Davies | Oxford University Press |
| 1996 | Finalist | War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage | Lawrence H. Keeley | Oxford University Press |
| 1996 | Finalist | William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic | Alan Taylor | Knopf |
| 1995 | Winner | Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America | Jackson Lears | Basic Books |
| 1995 | Finalist | Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe | Robert Jensen | Princeton University Press |
| 1995 | Finalist | Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory | Ian Hacking | Princeton University Press |
| 1995 | Finalist | Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South | John Egerton | Knopf |
| 1995 | Finalist | Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 | David Holloway | Yale University Press |
| 1994 | Winner | Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 | George Chauncey | Basic Books |
| 1994 | Finalist | Anti-Semitism in America | Leonard Dinnerstein | Unknown |
| 1994 | Finalist | Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 | George Sanchez | Oxford University Press |
| 1994 | Finalist | Marriage of Likeness: Same-sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe | John Boswell | Unknown |
| 1994 | Finalist | Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times | Elizabeth Wayland Barber | W. W. Norton |
| 1993 | Winner | New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery | Anthony Grafton | Belknap Press |
| 1993 | Finalist | Rising in the West: The True Story of an “Okie” family in Search of the American Dream | Dan Morgan | Vintage Books |
| 1993 | Finalist | The Immobile Empire | Alain Peyrefitte, Jon Rothschild | Vintage Books |
| 1993 | Finalist | The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity | James C. Cobb | Oxford University Press |
| 1993 | Finalist | Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 | Jane Hamilton-Merritt | Indiana University Press |
| 1992 | Winner | Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism | Alexander Stille | Trafalgar Square Publishing |
| 1992 | Finalist | Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People | Noel Mostert | Knopf |
| 1992 | Finalist | Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China | Robert P. Newman | University of California Press |
| 1992 | Finalist | The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics | Greg Mitchell | Random House |
| 1992 | Finalist | Triumphs and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People | Ramón Eduardo Ruiz | W. W. Norton |
| 1991 | Winner | The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America | Nicholas Lemann | Knopf |
| 1991 | Finalist | Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era | Kevin Brownlow | Knopf |
| 1991 | Finalist | Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 | Philip A. Kuhn | Harvard University Press |
| 1991 | Finalist | Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 | Robert C. Tucker | W. W. Norton |
| 1991 | Finalist | The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power | Daniel Yergin | Simon & Schuster |
| 1990 | Winner | The Quest for El Cid | Richard Fletcher | Hutchinson |
| 1990 | Finalist | A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914–1922 | David Fromkin | Henry Holt |
| 1990 | Finalist | Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People | Jon Butler | Harvard University Press |
| 1990 | Finalist | Italy and its Monarchy | Denis Mack Smith | Yale University Press |
| 1990 | Finalist | The Search for Modern China | Jonathan D. Spence | W. W. Norton |
| 1989 | Winner | An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood | Neal Gabler | Anchor |
| 1988 | Winner | Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 | Eric Foner | HarperCollins |
| 1987 | Winner | The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide | Robert Jay Lifton | Unknown |
| 1986 | Winner | The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within | Geoffrey Hosking | Harvard University Press |
| 1985 | Winner | Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn | Evan S. Connell | North Point Press |
| 1984 | Winner | The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History | Robert Darnton | Basic Books |
| 1983 | Winner | The Wheels of Commerce | Fernand Braudel | HarperCollins |
| 1982 | Winner | The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895–1980 | Jonathan D. Spence | Unknown |
| 1981 | Winner | Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century | Ray Allen Billington | W. W. Norton |
| 1980 | Winner | Walter Lippmann and the American Century | Ronald Steel | Taylor & Francis |