| 2026 | Winner | Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance | William D. Lopez | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| 2025 | Winner | Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence across the Border | Ieva Jusionyte | University of California Press |
| 2024 | Winner | Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City | Katie J. Wells, Kafui Attoh,, Declan Cullen | Princeton University Press |
| 2023 | Winner | Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America | Gregory D. Smithers | Beacon Press |
| 2022 | Winner | Halfway Home | Reuben Miller | Little, Brown |
| 2021 | Winner | The Tragedy of Heterosexuality | Jane Ward | New York University Press |
| 2020 | Winner | Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving | Caitlyn Collins | Princeton University Press |
| 2019 | Winner | The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender | Revolution | New York University Press |
| 2018 | Winner | Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution | Sherine Hamdy, Coleman Nye, Sarula Bao, Caroline Brewer | University of Toronto Press |
| 2018 | Honorable mention | Someone To Talk To | Mario Luis Small | Oxford University Press |
| 2018 | Honorable mention | The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race | Neda Maghbouleh | Stanford University Press |
| 2017 | Winner | Enduring Uncertainty: Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life | Ines Hasselberg | Berghahn Books |
| 2017 | Winner | Fighting King Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in Central Appalachia | Shannon Elizabeth Bell | MIT Press |
| 2017 | Honorable mention | Exiled in America: Life on the Margins in a Residential Motel | Christopher P. Dum | Columbia University Press |
| 2017 | Honorable mention | Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory | Julian Go | Oxford University Press |
| 2017 | Honorable mention | Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia | Ana Mariella Bacigalupo | University of Texas Press |
| 2016 | Winner | European Products: Making and Unmaking Heritage in Cyprus | Gisela Welz | Berghahn Books |
| 2016 | Winner | The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology | Aldon D. Morris | University of California Press |
| 2016 | Honorable mention | America's Safest City: Delinquency and Modernity in Suburbia | Simon I. Singer | New York University Press |
| 2016 | Honorable mention | American Zoo: A Sociological Safari | David Grazian | Princeton University Press |
| 2016 | Honorable mention | The Analysis of Burned Human Remains | Christopher W. Schmidt, Steven A. Symes | Elsevier |
| 2015 | Winner | Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Medicins Sans Frontieres | Renee C. Fox | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| 2015 | Honorable mention | Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America | Doug McAdam, Karina Kloos | Oxford University Press |
| 2015 | Honorable mention | Reluctant Witness: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness | Arlene Stein | Oxford University Press |
| 2013 | Winner | Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality Ambiguous Danger | Patrick Sharkey | University of Chicago Press |
| 2013 | Honorable mention | The New York Nobody Knows | William B. Helmreich | Princeton University Press |
| 2012 | Winner | Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger | Harvey Molotch | Princeton University Press |
| 2012 | Honorable mention | Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community | Eviatar Zerubavel | Oxford University Press |
| 2012 | Honorable mention | Networked: The New Social Operating System | Lee Rainie, Barry Wellman | MIT Press |
| 2008 | Winner | Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District | Peter Moskos | Princeton University Press |
| 2008 | Honorable mention | New Tech, New Ties | Rich Ling | MIT Press |
| 2007 | Winner | Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life | Evan Stark | Oxford University Press |
| 2007 | Honorable mention | Poverty and Discrimination | Kevin Lang | Princeton University Press |
| 2006 | Winner | The Civil Sphere | Jeffrey C. Alexander | Oxford University Press |
| 2006 | Honorable mention | Territory, Authority, Rights | Saskia Sassen | Princeton University Press |
| 2005 | Winner | The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream | Phyllis Moen, Patricia Roehling | Rowman and Littlefield |
| 2004 | Winner | The Human Fossil Record: Volume Three, Brain Endocasts - The Paleoneurological Evidence | Ralph L. Halloway, Douglas C. Broadfield,, Michael S. Yuan | Wiley |
| 2004 | Honorable mention | Appalachian Folkways | John B. Rehder | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| 2003 | Winner | Lothagam | Meave G. Leakey, John M. Harris | Columbia University Press |
| 2003 | Honorable mention | Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration | Richard Alba, Victor Nee | Harvard University Press |
| 2002 | Winner | Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago | Eric Klinenberg | University of Chicago Press |
| 2002 | Honorable mention | The Penitente Brotherhood | Michael P. Carroll | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| 1998 | Winner | The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change | Randall Collins | Harvard University Press |
| 1997 | Winner | The Anatomy of Disgust | William Ian Miller | Harvard University Press |
| 1996 | Winner | Encyclopedia of World Cultures | Editor-in-Chief: David Levinson | G.K. Hall |
| 1995 | Winner | The Power of Place : Urban Landscapes as Public History | Dolores Hayden | MIT Press |
| 1995 | Honorable mention | In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio | Philippe Bourgois | Cambridge University Press |
| 1994 | Winner | The Homeless | Christopher Jencks | Harvard University Press |
| 1994 | Honorable mention | Paradoxes of Gender | Judith Lorber | Yale University Press |
| 1993 | Winner | The Nariokotome Homo Erectus Skeleton | Alan Walker, an Richard Leakey | Harvard University Press |