| 2026 | Finalist | A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis | Jeanne Carstensen | Simon & Schuster |
| 2026 | Finalist | Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning | Peter Beinart | Knopf |
| 2026 | Finalist | Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity | Joseph Lee | Simon & Schuster |
| 2026 | Finalist | The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery | Siddharth Kara | St. Martin's Press |
| 2026 | Finalist | We Survived the Night | Julian Brave NoiseCat | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| 2025 | Winner | In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States | Ana Raquel Minian | Viking |
| 2025 | Finalist | The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq | Steve Coll | Penguin Press |
| 2025 | Finalist | The Lucky Ones: A Memoir | Zara Chowdhary | Crown |
| 2025 | Finalist | The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA | Jesse Katz | Astra House |
| 2024 | Winner | The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America | Saket Soni | Algonquin Books |
| 2024 | Finalist | We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America | Roxanna Asgarian | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2024 | Finalist | Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World | John Vaillant | Knopf |
| 2024 | Finalist | Cobalt Red: How the blood of the Congo powers our lives | Siddharth Kara | St. Martin's Press |
| 2024 | Finalist | Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It | Tobias Rose-Stockwell | Legacy Lit |
| 2023 | Winner | The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning | Eve Fairbanks | Simon & Schuster |
| 2023 | Finalist | Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands | Kelly Lytle Hernández | W. W. Norton |
| 2023 | Finalist | South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation | Imani Perry | HarperCollins |
| 2023 | Finalist | Solito: A Memoir | Javier Zamora | Hogarth |
| 2023 | Finalist | The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind | Martin Sixsmith | Pegasus Books |
| 2022 | Winner | All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake | Tiya Miles | Random House |
| 2022 | Finalist | Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City | Andrea Elliott | Random House |
| 2022 | Finalist | Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 | Sarah Schulman | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2022 | Finalist | How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America | Clint Smith | Little, Brown |
| 2022 | Finalist | Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration | Reuben Jonathan Miller | Little, Brown |
| 2021 | Winner | Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals | Saidiya Hartman | W. W. Norton |
| 2021 | Finalist | Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents | Isabel Wilkerson | Random House |
| 2021 | Finalist | Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family | Robert Kolker | Doubleday |
| 2021 | Finalist | The Yellow House | Sarah M. Broom | Grove Press |
| 2021 | Finalist | Deported Americans | Beth C. Caldwell | Duke University Press |
| 2019 | Winner | In a Day's Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence against America's Most Vulnerable Workers | Bernice Yeung | The New Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment | Shane Bauer | Penguin Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America | Eliza Griswold | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2019 | Finalist | One Person, No Vote | Carol Anderson | Bloomsbury |
| 2019 | Finalist | The Beekeeper | Dunya Mikhail | New Directions |
| 2017 | Winner | Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City | Matthew Desmond | Crown |
| 2017 | Finalist | Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America | Patrick Phillips | W. W. Norton |
| 2017 | Finalist | Bad News | Anjan Sundaram | Doubleday |
| 2017 | Finalist | Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran | Laura Secor | Riverhead Books |
| 2017 | Finalist | Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic | Sam Quinones | Bloomsbury |
| 2015 | Winner | Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital | Sheri Fink | Crown |
| 2015 | Finalist | League of Denial | Mark Fainaru-Wada, Steve Fainaru | Crown Archetype |
| 2015 | Finalist | Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality | Danielle Allen | Liveright |
| 2015 | Finalist | The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster | Jonathan M. Katz | Palgrave Macmillan |
| 2015 | Finalist | This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate | Naomi Klein | Simon & Schuster |
| 2013 | Winner | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Katherine Boo | Random House |
| 2013 | Finalist | God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine | Victoria Sweet | Riverhead Books |
| 2013 | Finalist | Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 | Anne Applebaum | Doubleday |
| 2013 | Finalist | Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them | Donovan Hohn | Penguin Books |
| 2011 | Winner | Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire | Robert Perkinson | Picador |
| 2011 | Finalist | Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq | John W. Dower | W. W. Norton |
| 2011 | Finalist | The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration | Isabel Wilkerson | Random House |
| 2009 | Winner | The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century | Steve Coll | Penguin Books |
| 2009 | Finalist | Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography | Stanley Plumly | W. W. Norton |
| 2009 | Finalist | Samuel Johnson: The Struggle | Jeffrey Meyers | Basic Books |
| 2007 | Winner | House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power | James Carroll | Mariner Books |
| 2007 | Finalist | Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq | Thomas E. Ricks | Penguin Books |
| 2007 | Finalist | The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation | Gene Roberts, Hank Klibanoff | Knopf |