| 2025 | Winner | Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI | Karen Hao | Penguin Press |
| 2025 | Finalist | Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins | Barbara Demick | Random House |
| 2025 | Finalist | No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson | Gardiner Harris | Random House |
| 2025 | Finalist | America, América: A New History of the New World | Greg Grandin | Penguin Press |
| 2025 | Finalist | King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation | Scott Anderson | Doubleday |
| 2025 | Longlist | A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile | Aatish Taseer | Catapult |
| 2025 | Longlist | Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writing s | Honorée Fanonne Jeffers | Harper |
| 2025 | Longlist | Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness | Michael Koresky | Bloomsbury |
| 2025 | Longlist | Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America | Michael Luo | Doubleday |
| 2025 | Longlist | The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story | Brandy Schillace | W. W. Norton |
| 2024 | Winner | Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space | Adam Higginbotham | Simon & Schuster |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq | Steve Coll | Penguin Press |
| 2024 | Finalist | We’re Alone | Edwidge Danticat | Graywolf Press |
| 2024 | Finalist | Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood | Gretchen Sisson | St. Martin's Press |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture | Tricia Romano | PublicAffairs |
| 2024 | Longlist | A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery | Lawrence Ingrassia | Unknown |
| 2024 | Longlist | Kent State: An American Tragedy | Brian VanDeMark | W. W. Norton |
| 2024 | Longlist | Slaveroad | John Edgar Wideman | Scribner |
| 2024 | Longlist | The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth | Zoë Schlanger | HarperCollins |
| 2024 | Longlist | There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension | Hanif Abdurraqib | Penguin Books |
| 2023 | Winner | We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America | Roxanna Asgarian | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2023 | Finalist | The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War | Jeff Sharlet | Penguin Press |
| 2023 | Finalist | Ordinary Notes | Christina Sharpe | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2023 | Finalist | Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State | Kerry Howley | Knopf |
| 2023 | Finalist | Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough | Dina Nayeri | Catapult |
| 2022 | Winner | The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act | Isaac Butler | Bloomsbury |
| 2022 | Finalist | Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between | Joseph Osmundson | W. W. Norton |
| 2022 | Finalist | Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands | Kelly Lytle Hernández | W. W. Norton |
| 2022 | Finalist | An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us | Ed Yong | Random House |
| 2022 | Finalist | Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and its Role in the Climate Crisis | Annie Proulx | Scribner |
| 2021 | Winner | How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America | Clint Smith | Little, Brown |
| 2021 | Finalist | The Family Roe: An American Story | Joshua Prager | W. W. Norton |
| 2021 | Finalist | Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty | Patrick Radden Keefe | Doubleday |
| 2021 | Finalist | Orwell’s Roses | Rebecca Solnit | Viking |
| 2021 | Finalist | The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth | Sam Quinones | Bloomsbury |
| 2020 | Winner | Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire | Tom Zoellner | Harvard University Press |
| 2020 | Finalist | Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents | Isabel Wilkerson | Random House |
| 2020 | Finalist | Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future | James Shapiro | Penguin Press |
| 2020 | Finalist | The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States | Walter Johnson | Basic Books |
| 2020 | Finalist | She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs | Sarah Smarsh | Scribner |
| 2019 | Winner | Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland | Patrick Radden Keefe | William Collins |
| 2019 | Finalist | Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future | Kate Brown | W. W. Norton |
| 2019 | Finalist | The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution | Peter Hessler | Penguin Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives | Walt Odets | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2019 | Finalist | No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us | Rachel Louise Snyder | Bloomsbury |
| 2018 | Winner | Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan | Steve Coll | Penguin Press |
| 2018 | Finalist | We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights | Adam Winkler | Liveright |
| 2018 | Finalist | The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure | Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt | Penguin Press |
| 2018 | Finalist | God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State | Lawrence Wright | Knopf |
| 2018 | Finalist | The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border | Francisco Cantú | Riverhead Books |
| 2017 | Winner | The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America | Frances FitzGerald | Simon & Schuster |
| 2017 | Finalist | A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes | Adam Rutherford | W. W. Norton |
| 2017 | Finalist | The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea | Jack E. Davis | Liveright |
| 2017 | Finalist | The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia | Masha Gessen | Riverhead Books |
| 2017 | Finalist | Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe | Kapka Kassabova | Graywolf Press |
| 2016 | Winner | Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City | Matthew Desmond | Crown |
| 2016 | Finalist | Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File | John Edgar Wideman | Scribner |
| 2016 | Finalist | Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right | Jane Mayer | Doubleday |
| 2016 | Finalist | Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War | Viet Thanh Nguyen | Harvard University Press |
| 2016 | Finalist | Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America | Ibram X. Kendi | Nation Books |
| 2015 | Winner | Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic | Sam Quinones | Bloomsbury |
| 2015 | Finalist | Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America | Jill Leovy | One World |
| 2015 | Finalist | Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America | Ari Berman | Macmillan |
| 2015 | Finalist | SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome | Mary Beard | W. W. Norton |
| 2015 | Finalist | What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing | Brian Seibert | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2014 | Winner | The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation | David Brion Davis | Knopf |
| 2014 | Finalist | Capital in the Twenty-First Century | Thomas Piketty with Arthur Goldhammer | Unknown |
| 2014 | Finalist | Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free | Héctor Tobar | Sceptre |
| 2014 | Finalist | The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History | Elizabeth Kolbert | Henry Holt |
| 2014 | Finalist | The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book | Peter Finn, Petra Couvee | Vintage Books |
| 2013 | Winner | Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital | Sheri Fink | Crown |
| 2013 | Finalist | Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief | Lawrence Wright | Vintage Books |
| 2013 | Finalist | Thank You for Your Service | David Finkel | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2013 | Finalist | The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America | George Packer | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2013 | Finalist | Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice | Kevin Cullen, Shelley Murphy | W. W. Norton |
| 2012 | Winner | Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity | Andrew Solomon | Scribner |
| 2012 | Finalist | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Katherine Boo | Random House |
| 2012 | Finalist | Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power | Steve Coll | Allen Lane |
| 2012 | Finalist | Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic | David Quammen | W. W. Norton |
| 2012 | Finalist | Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story | Jim Holt | Liveright |
| 2011 | Winner | Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World | Maya Jasanoff | Knopf |
| 2011 | Finalist | A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War | Amanda Foreman | Unknown |
| 2011 | Finalist | Pulphead: Essays | John Jeremiah Sullivan | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2011 | Finalist | The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood | James Gleick | Fourth Estate |
| 2011 | Finalist | To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 | Adam Hochschild | HarperCollins |
| 2010 | Winner | The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration | Isabel Wilkerson | Random House |
| 2010 | Finalist | Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet | Jennifer Homans | Granta Books |
| 2010 | Finalist | Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History | S.C. Gwynne | Scribner |
| 2010 | Finalist | Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea | Barbara Demick | Spiegel & Grau |
| 2010 | Finalist | The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Siddhartha Mukherjee | Scribner |
| 2009 | Winner | The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science | Richard Holmes | HarperCollins |
| 2009 | Finalist | Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City | Greg Grandin | Metropolitan Books |
| 2009 | Finalist | Imperial | William T. Vollmann | Viking |
| 2009 | Finalist | Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness | Tracy Kidder | Random House |
| 2009 | Finalist | The Hindus: An Alternative History | Wendy Doniger | Oxford University Press |
| 2008 | Winner | The Forever War | Dexter Filkins | Knopf |
| 2008 | Finalist | From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 | George C. Herring | Oxford University Press |
| 2008 | Finalist | The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals | Jane Mayer | Doubleday |
| 2008 | Finalist | This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | Drew Gilpin Faust | Vintage Books |
| 2008 | Finalist | White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement | Allan Lichtman | Atlantic Monthly Press |
| 2007 | Winner | Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present | Harriet A. Washington | Doubleday |
| 2007 | Finalist | American Transcendentalism | Philip Gura | Hill and Wang |
| 2007 | Finalist | Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA | Tim Weiner | Doubleday |
| 2007 | Finalist | The World Without Us | Alan Weisman | Unknown |
| 2007 | Finalist | What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848 | Daniel Walker Howe | Oxford University Press |
| 2006 | Winner | Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution | Simon Schama | Random House |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade | Ann Fessler | Unknown |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East | Sandy Tolan | Bloomsbury |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq | Patrick Cockburn | Verso Books |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals | Michael Pollan | Unknown |
| 2005 | Winner | Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster | Svetlana Alexievich | Unknown |
| 2005 | Finalist | Eating Stone: Imagination And The Loss Of The Wild | Ellen Meloy | Pantheon |
| 2005 | Finalist | Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees | Caroline Moorehead | Chatto & Windus |
| 2005 | Finalist | Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War | Anthony Shadid | Henry Holt and Company |
| 2005 | Finalist | The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East | Robert Fisk | Unknown |
| 2004 | Winner | The Reformation: A History | Diarmaid MacCulloch | Viking |
| 2004 | Finalist | Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age | Kevin Boyle | Henry Holt and Company |
| 2004 | Finalist | Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story | Timothy Tyson | Three Rivers Press |
| 2004 | Finalist | Blue Blood | Edward Conlon | Ebury Publishing |
| 2004 | Finalist | The Working Poor: Invisible in America | David Shipler | Knopf |
| 2003 | Winner | Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy | Paul Hendrickson | Vintage Books |
| 2003 | Finalist | Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps | Anne Applebaum | Doubleday |
| 2003 | Finalist | Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx | Adrian Nicole LeBlanc | Scribner |
| 2003 | Finalist | Rising Up and Rising Down | William T. Vollmann | Ecco |
| 2003 | Finalist | The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty | Caroline Alexander | Unknown |
| 2002 | Winner | "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide | Samantha Power | Basic Books |
| 2002 | Finalist | American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center | William Langewiesche | North Point Press |
| 2002 | Finalist | Brown: The Last Discovery of America | Richard Rodriguez | Viking |
| 2002 | Finalist | Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life | Gaby Wood | Knopf |
| 2002 | Finalist | War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning | Chris Hedges | Unknown |
| 2001 | Winner | Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper | Nicholson Baker | Vintage Books |
| 2001 | Finalist | Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland | Jan T. Gross | Princeton University Press |
| 2001 | Finalist | Seabiscuit: An American Legend | Laura Hillenbrand | Random House |
| 2001 | Finalist | The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair | Sam Roberts | Random House |
| 2001 | Finalist | The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care | Nina Bernstein | Pantheon |
| 2000 | Winner | Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing | Ted Conover | Random House |
| 2000 | Finalist | Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health | Laurie Garrett | Unknown |
| 2000 | Finalist | Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 | Fred Anderson | Knopf |
| 2000 | Finalist | The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach | Alice Kaplan | University of Chicago Press |
| 2000 | Finalist | Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War | Frances FitzGerald | Simon & Schuster |
| 1999 | Winner | Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior | Jonathan Weiner | Faber & Faber |
| 1999 | Finalist | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | John W. Dower | The New Press |
| 1999 | Finalist | Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History | Jane Brox | Beacon Press |
| 1999 | Finalist | I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory | Patricia Hampl | W. W. Norton |
| 1999 | Finalist | The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon’s Exile on Saint Helena | Jean-Paul Kauffmann | Unknown |
| 1998 | Winner | We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda | Philip Gourevitch | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1998 | Finalist | King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism In Colonial Africa | Adam Hochschild | Mariner Books |
| 1998 | Finalist | Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America | Ira Berlin | Harvard University Press |
| 1998 | Finalist | The Bible as It Was | Roy Porter | Unknown |
| 1998 | Finalist | The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary | Simon Winchester | Unknown |
| 1997 | Winner | The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures | Anne Fadiman | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1997 | Finalist | American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence | Pauline Maier | Vintage Books |
| 1997 | Finalist | How the Mind Works | Steven Pinker | W. W. Norton |
| 1997 | Finalist | Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster | Jon Krakauer | Villard |
| 1997 | Finalist | The Bible as It Was | James Kugel | Belknap Press |
| 1996 | Winner | Bad Land: An American Romance | Jonathan Raban | Pantheon |
| 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 | Great Books | David Denby | Simon & Schuster |
| 1996 | Finalist | Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust | Daniel Goldhagen | Random House |
| 1996 | Finalist | The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years | Bernard Lewis | Scribner |
| 1995 | Winner | A Civil Action | Jonathan Harr | Random House |
| 1995 | Finalist | A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books | Nicholas Basbanes | Henry Holt and Company |
| 1995 | Finalist | All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence | Fox Butterfield | Knopf |
| 1995 | Finalist | In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle | Madeleine Blais | Grove Atlantic |
| 1995 | Finalist | Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology | Lawrence Weschler | Pantheon |
| 1994 | Winner | The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War | Lynn H. Nicholas | Knopf |
| 1994 | Finalist | How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter | Sherwin B. Nuland | Knopf |
| 1994 | Finalist | My Own Country: A Doctor's Story | Abraham Verghese | Simon & Schuster |
| 1994 | Finalist | Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas | Jane Mayer, Jill Abramson | Unknown |
| 1994 | Finalist | The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America | John Putnam Demos | Vintage Books |
| 1993 | Winner | The Land Where the Blues Began | Alan Lomax | Pantheon |
| 1993 | Finalist | Genie: An Abused Child’s Flight From Silence | Russ Rymer | HarperCollins |
| 1993 | Finalist | Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire | David Remnick | Random House |
| 1993 | Finalist | The Last Panda | George B. Schaller | University of Chicago Press |
| 1993 | Finalist | Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age | Rosemary Mahoney | Unknown |
| 1992 | Winner | Young Men and Fire | Norman Maclean | University of Chicago Press |
| 1992 | Finalist | Breaking the Maya Code | Michael D. Coe | Penguin Press |
| 1992 | Finalist | Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil | Nancy Scheper-Hughes | University of California Press |
| 1992 | Finalist | Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America | Donald Katz | HarperCollins |
| 1992 | Finalist | The Diversity of Life | Edward O. Wilson | W. W. Norton |
| 1991 | Winner | Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women | Susan Faludi | Crown |
| 1991 | Finalist | Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe | Dennis Overbye | Harper Perennial |
| 1991 | Finalist | Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Non-Fiction | Melissa Fay Greene | Secker & Warburg |
| 1991 | Finalist | Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools | Jonathan Kozol | Unknown |
| 1991 | Finalist | Which Side Are You on? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back | Thomas Geoghegan | Unknown |
| 1990 | Winner | The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America | Shelby Steele | St. Martin's Press |
| 1990 | Finalist | City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles | Mike Davis | Verso Books |
| 1990 | Finalist | Disappearing through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century | O. B. Hardison, Jr. | Unknown |
| 1990 | Finalist | Samba | Alma Guillermoprieto | Knopf |
| 1990 | Finalist | The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath | Kevin Phillips | HarperCollins |
| 1989 | Winner | The Broken Cord: A Family's Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome | Michael Dorris | Unknown |
| 1989 | Finalist | A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914–1922 | David Fromkin | Henry Holt |
| 1989 | Finalist | Among Schoolchildren | Tracy Kidder | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 1989 | Finalist | Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class | Barbara Ehrenreich | Harper Perennial |
| 1989 | Finalist | The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier | Amy Wilentz | Simon & Schuster |
| 1988 | Winner | Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 | Taylor Branch | Simon & Schuster |
| 1988 | Finalist | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam | Neil Sheehan | Random House |
| 1988 | Finalist | Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era | James M. McPherson | Oxford University Press |
| 1988 | Finalist | Europeans | Jane Kramer | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1988 | Finalist | Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 | Eric Foner | HarperCollins |
| 1987 | Winner | The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Richard Rhodes | Simon & Schuster |
| 1987 | Finalist | And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic | Randy Shilts | Penguin Press |
| 1987 | Finalist | Democracy Is in the Streets | James Miller | Unknown |
| 1987 | Finalist | The Genius of the People | Charles Mee | Unknown |
| 1987 | Finalist | Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle | Stephen Jay Gould | Unknown |
| 1986 | Winner | Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape | Barry Lopez | Scribner |
| 1986 | Finalist | Bird of Life, Bird of Death: A Naturalist’s Journey Through a Land of Political Turmoil | Jonathan Evan Maslow | Simon & Schuster |
| 1986 | Finalist | Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water | Marc Reisner | Secker & Warburg |
| 1986 | Finalist | Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution | Bernard Bailyn | Knopf |
| 1986 | Finalist | War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War | John W. Dower | Pantheon |
| 1985 | Winner | Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families | J. Anthony Lukas | Knopf |
| 1985 | Finalist | Distant Neighbors: The Portrait of the Mexicans | Alan Riding | Vintage Books |
| 1985 | Finalist | House | Tracy Kidder | Houghton Mifflin |
| 1985 | Finalist | The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World | Elaine Scarry | Oxford University Press |
| 1985 | Finalist | The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens | Eva Keuls | HarperCollins |
| 1984 | Winner | Weapons and Hope | Freeman Dyson | Harper & Row |
| 1984 | Finalist | Brothers and Keepers | John Edgar Wideman | Holt, Rinehart and Winston |
| 1984 | Finalist | Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Big Horn | Evan Connell | Unknown |
| 1984 | Finalist | The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 | David Wyman | The New Press |
| 1984 | Finalist | The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History | Robert Darnton | Basic Books |
| 1983 | Winner | The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House | Seymour M. Hersh | Summit Books |
| 1983 | Finalist | Children of War | Roger Rosenblatt | Unknown |
| 1983 | Finalist | Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman | William W. Warner | Little, Brown |
| 1983 | Finalist | Present History: On Nuclear War, Detente and Other | Theodore Draper | Unknown |
| 1983 | Finalist | Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World | David S. Landes | Unknown |
| 1982 | Winner | The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power | Robert A. Caro | Knopf |
| 1982 | Finalist | Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood | Kate Simon | Harper & Row |
| 1982 | Finalist | Stolen Lightning | Daniel Lawrence O’Keefe | Unknown |
| 1982 | Finalist | The Fate of the Earth | Jonathan Schell | Knopf |
| 1982 | Finalist | The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age | George F. Kennan | Unknown |
| 1981 | Winner | The Mismeasure of Man | Stephen Jay Gould | W. W. Norton |
| 1981 | Finalist | Forms of Talk | Erving Goffman | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| 1981 | Finalist | National Defense | James Fallows | Vintage Books |
| 1981 | Finalist | No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 | T. J. Jackson Lears | Unknown |
| 1981 | Finalist | Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello | Dumas Malone | Unknown |
| 1980 | Winner | Walter Lippmann and the American Century | Ronald Steel | Taylor & Francis |
| 1980 | Finalist | Alice James: A Biography | Jean Strouse | New York Review Books |
| 1980 | Finalist | China Men | Maxine Hong Kingston | Knopf |
| 1980 | Finalist | Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the 14th Century | John Boswell | University of Chicago Press |
| 1980 | Finalist | Walt Whitman: A Life | Justin Kaplan | Simon & Schuster |
| 1979 | Winner | Munich: The Price of Peace | Telford Taylor | Vintage Books |
| 1979 | Finalist | African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan | Edward Hoagland | Unknown |
| 1979 | Finalist | Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid | Douglas Hofstadter | Basic Books |
| 1979 | Finalist | The Right Stuff | Tom Wolfe | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1979 | Finalist | The White Album | Joan Didion | Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
| 1978 | Co-winner | Facts of Life | Maureen Howard | Little, Brown |
| 1978 | Co-winner | Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence | Garry Wills | Vintage Books |
| 1978 | Finalist | A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century | Barbara W. Tuchman | Ballantine Books |
| 1978 | Finalist | In Search of History: A Personal Adventure | Theodore H. White | Unknown |
| 1978 | Finalist | Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt | Barrington Moore | Palgrave Macmillan |
| 1978 | Finalist | Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life | Sissela Bok | Vintage Books |
| 1978 | Finalist | Max Perkins: Editor of Genius | A. Scott Berg | Penguin Press |
| 1978 | Finalist | New York Jew | Alfred Kazin | Knopf |
| 1978 | Finalist | Seeing Through Clothes | Anne Hollander | Avon Books |
| 1978 | Finalist | The Snow Leopard | Peter Matthiessen | Penguin Books |
| 1977 | Winner | Samuel Johnson | Walter Jackson Bate | Harcourt |
| 1977 | Finalist | Coming Into the Country | John McPhee | Unknown |
| 1977 | Finalist | Dispatches | Michael Herr | Avon Books |
| 1977 | Finalist | The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence | Carl Sagan | Random House |
| 1977 | Finalist | The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 | David McCullough | Simon & Schuster |
| 1976 | Winner | The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts | Maxine Hong Kingston | Knopf |
| 1976 | Finalist | Roots | Alex Haley | Unknown |
| 1976 | Finalist | Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality | Richard Kluger | Knopf |
| 1976 | Finalist | The Damnable Question: A Study in Anglo-Irish Relations | George Dangerfield | Unknown |
| 1976 | Finalist | World of Our Fathers | Irving Howe with Kenneth Libo | Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
| 1975 | Winner | Edith Wharton: A Biography | R. W. B. Lewis | Harper |