| 2026 | Winner | There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America | Brian Goldstone | Crown |
| 2026 | Finalist | A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children | Haley Cohen Gilliland | Avid Reader Press |
| 2026 | Finalist | Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church | Kevin Sack | Crown |
| 2025 | Winner | To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement | Benjamin Nathans | Princeton University Press |
| 2025 | Finalist | I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist's Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India | Rollo Romig | Penguin Books |
| 2025 | Finalist | Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala | Rachel Nolan | Harvard University Press |
| 2024 | Winner | A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy | Nathan Thrall | Metropolitan Books |
| 2024 | Finalist | Cobalt Red: How the blood of the Congo powers our lives | Siddharth Kara | St. Martin's Press |
| 2024 | Finalist | Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World | John Vaillant | Knopf |
| 2023 | Winner | His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice | Robert Samuels, Toluse Olorunnipa | Viking |
| 2023 | Finalist | Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern | Jing Tsu | Riverhead Books |
| 2023 | Finalist | Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction | David George Haskell | Viking |
| 2023 | Finalist | Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation | Linda Villarosa | Doubleday |
| 2022 | Winner | Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City | Andrea Elliott | Random House |
| 2022 | Finalist | Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism | Carla Power | One World |
| 2022 | Finalist | The Family Roe: An American Story | Joshua Prager | W. W. Norton |
| 2021 | Winner | Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy | David Zucchino | Atlantic Monthly Press |
| 2021 | Finalist | Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning | Cathy Park Hong | One World |
| 2021 | Finalist | Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country | Sierra Crane Murdoch | Random House |
| 2020 | Co-winner | The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America | Greg Grandin | Metropolitan Books |
| 2020 | Co-winner | The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care | Anne Boyer | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2020 | Finalist | Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life | Louise Aronson | Bloomsbury |
| 2020 | Finalist | Solitary | Albert Woodfox with Leslie George | Grove Press |
| 2019 | Winner | Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America | Eliza Griswold | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2019 | Finalist | In a Day's Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence against America's Most Vulnerable Workers | Bernice Yeung | The New Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore | Elizabeth Rush | Milkweed Editions |
| 2018 | Winner | Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America | James Forman Jr. | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2018 | Finalist | Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World | Suzy Hansen | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2018 | Finalist | The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us | Richard Prum | Doubleday |
| 2017 | Winner | Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City | Matthew Desmond | Crown |
| 2017 | Finalist | In a Different Key: The Story of Autism | John Donvan, Caren Zucker | Crown |
| 2017 | Finalist | The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery | Micki McElya | Harvard University Press |
| 2016 | Winner | Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS | Joby Warrick | Doubleday |
| 2016 | Finalist | Between the World and Me | Ta-Nehisi Coates | Spiegel & Grau |
| 2016 | Finalist | If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran | Carla Power | Henry Holt |
| 2015 | Winner | The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History | Elizabeth Kolbert | Henry Holt |
| 2015 | Finalist | Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China | Evan Osnos | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2015 | Finalist | No Good Men among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes | Anand Gopal | Metropolitan Books |
| 2014 | Winner | Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation | Dan Fagin | Bantam Books |
| 2014 | Finalist | The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide | Gary J. Bass | Knopf |
| 2014 | Finalist | The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War | Fred Kaplan | Simon & Schuster |
| 2013 | Winner | Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America | Gilbert King | Harper |
| 2013 | Finalist | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Katherine Boo | Random House |
| 2013 | Finalist | The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature | David G. Haskell | Viking |
| 2012 | Winner | The Swerve: How the World Became Modern | Stephen Greenblatt | W. W. Norton |
| 2012 | Finalist | One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing | Diane Ackerman | W. W. Norton |
| 2012 | Finalist | Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men | Mara Hvistendahl | PublicAffairs |
| 2011 | Winner | The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Siddhartha Mukherjee | Scribner |
| 2011 | 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 |
| 2011 | Finalist | The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains | Nicholas G. Carr | W. W. Norton |
| 2010 | Winner | The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy | David E. Hoffman | Doubleday |
| 2010 | Finalist | How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities | John Cassidy | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2010 | Finalist | The Evolution of God | Robert Wright | Little, Brown |
| 2009 | Winner | Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II | Douglas A. Blackmon | Doubleday |
| 2009 | Finalist | Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age | Arthur Herman | Bantam Books |
| 2009 | Finalist | The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe | William I. Hitchcock | Free Press |
| 2008 | Winner | The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 | Saul Friedländer | HarperCollins |
| 2008 | Finalist | The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America | Allan Brandt | Basic Books |
| 2008 | Finalist | The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | Alex Ross | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2007 | Winner | The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 | Lawrence Wright | Knopf |
| 2007 | Finalist | Crazy: A Father's Search through America's Mental Health Madness | Pete Earley | Putnam |
| 2007 | Finalist | Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq | Thomas E. Ricks | Penguin Books |
| 2006 | Winner | Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya | Caroline Elkins | Henry Holt |
| 2006 | Finalist | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Tony Judt | Penguin Books |
| 2006 | Finalist | The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq | George Packer | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2005 | Winner | Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 | Steve Coll | Penguin Books |
| 2005 | Finalist | Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found | Suketu Mehta | Knopf |
| 2005 | Finalist | The Devil's Highway: A True Story | Luis Alberto Urrea | Little, Brown |
| 2004 | Winner | Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps | Anne Applebaum | Doubleday |
| 2004 | Finalist | Rembrandt's Jews | Steven Nadler | University of Chicago Press |
| 2004 | Finalist | The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military | Dana Priest | W. W. Norton |
| 2003 | Winner | "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide | Samantha Power | Basic Books |
| 2003 | Finalist | The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit | Ellen Meloy | Pantheon |
| 2003 | Finalist | The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature | Steven Pinker | Viking |
| 2002 | Winner | Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution | Diane McWhorter | Simon & Schuster |
| 2002 | Finalist | The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression | Andrew Solomon | Scribner |
| 2002 | Finalist | War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals | David Halberstam | Scribner |
| 2001 | Winner | Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan | Herbert P. Bix | HarperCollins |
| 2001 | Finalist | A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius | Dave Eggers | Simon & Schuster |
| 2001 | Finalist | Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing | Ted Conover | Random House |
| 2000 | Winner | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | John W. Dower | The New Press |
| 2000 | Finalist | Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds | Scott Weidensaul | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2000 | Finalist | The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory | Brian Greene | W. W. Norton |
| 1999 | Winner | Annals of the Former World | John McPhee | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1999 | Finalist | Crime and Punishment in America | Elliott Currie | Metropolitan Books |
| 1999 | Finalist | The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do | Judith Rich Harris | Free Press |
| 1998 | Winner | Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | Jared Diamond | W. W. Norton |
| 1998 | Finalist | How the Mind Works | Steven Pinker | W. W. Norton |
| 1998 | Finalist | Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster | Jon Krakauer | Villard |
| 1997 | Winner | Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris | Richard Kluger | Knopf |
| 1997 | Finalist | Fame and Folly | Cynthia Ozick | Knopf |
| 1997 | Finalist | The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond | Samuel G. Freedman | Simon & Schuster |
| 1996 | Winner | The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism | Tina Rosenberg | Random House |
| 1996 | Finalist | Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life | Daniel C. Dennett | Simon & Schuster |
| 1996 | Finalist | Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology | Lawrence Weschler | Pantheon |
| 1995 | Winner | The Beak of the Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time | Jonathan Weiner | Knopf |
| 1995 | Finalist | How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter | Sherwin B. Nuland | Knopf |
| 1995 | Finalist | Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story | John Berendt | Random House |
| 1994 | Winner | Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire | David Remnick | Random House |
| 1994 | Finalist | The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud | Peter Gay | W. W. Norton |
| 1994 | Finalist | The End of the Twentieth Century: And the End of the Modern Age | John Lukacs | Ticknor and Fields |
| 1993 | Winner | Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America | Garry Wills | Simon & Schuster |
| 1993 | Finalist | A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War | Susan Griffin | Doubleday |
| 1993 | Finalist | Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father | Richard Rodriguez | Viking |
| 1993 | Finalist | Where the Buffalo Roam: Restoring America's Great Plains | Anne Matthews | Grove Press |
| 1992 | Winner | The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power | Daniel Yergin | Simon & Schuster |
| 1992 | Finalist | Broken Vessels | Andre Dubus | David R. Godine |
| 1992 | Finalist | Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics | Thomas Byrne Edsall, Mary D. Edsall | W. W. Norton |
| 1991 | Winner | The Ants | Bert Hölldobler, Edward O. Wilson | Harvard University Press |
| 1991 | Finalist | Looking for a Ship | John McPhee | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1991 | Finalist | River of Traps: A Village Life | William deBuys, Alex Harris | University of New Mexico Press |
| 1990 | Winner | And Their Children after Them | Dale Maharidge, Michael Williamson | Pantheon |
| 1990 | Finalist | A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914–1922 | David Fromkin | Henry Holt |
| 1990 | Finalist | Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History | Stephen Jay Gould | W. W. Norton |
| 1989 | Winner | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam | Neil Sheehan | Random House |
| 1989 | Finalist | Coming of Age in the Milky Way | Timothy Ferris | William Morrow |
| 1989 | Finalist | Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years | McGeorge Bundy | Random House |
| 1989 | Finalist | The Last Farmer | Howard Kohn | Summit Books |
| 1988 | Winner | The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Richard Rhodes | Simon & Schuster |
| 1988 | Finalist | Chaos: Making a New Science | James Gleick | Viking |
| 1988 | Finalist | Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society | Daniel Callahan | Simon & Schuster |
| 1987 | Winner | Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land | David K. Shipler | Times Books |
| 1987 | Finalist | Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir | Cyra McFadden | Knopf |
| 1987 | Finalist | Rising from the Plains | John McPhee | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1986 | Co-winner | Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families | J. Anthony Lukas | Knopf |
| 1986 | Co-winner | Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White | Joseph Lelyveld | Times Books |
| 1986 | Finalist | Habits and the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life | Robert N. Bellah | University of California Press |
| 1985 | Winner | "The Good War": An Oral History of World War II | Studs Terkel | Pantheon |
| 1985 | Finalist | Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era | Donald Keene | Henry Holt |
| 1985 | Finalist | Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World | Jonathan Kwitny | Congdon and Weed |
| 1984 | Winner | The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry | Paul Starr | Basic Books |
| 1984 | Finalist | Conversations with the Enemy | Winston Groom, Duncan Spencer | Putnam |
| 1984 | Finalist | Wild Justice | Susan Jacoby | Harper |
| 1983 | Winner | Is There No Place on Earth for Me? | Susan Sheehan | Houghton Mifflin |
| 1983 | Finalist | Terrorists and Novelists | Diane Johnson | Knopf |
| 1983 | Finalist | The Fate of the Earth | Jonathan Schell | Knopf |
| 1982 | Winner | The Soul of a New Machine | Tracy Kidder | Atlantic Monthly Press |
| 1982 | Finalist | Basin and Range | John McPhee | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1982 | Finalist | Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor | Diana Trilling | Harcourt |
| 1981 | Winner | Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture | Carl E. Schorske | Knopf |
| 1981 | Finalist | China Men | Maxine Hong Kingston | Knopf |
| 1981 | Finalist | Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War | William Manchester | Little, Brown |
| 1981 | Finalist | Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey | Marshall Frady | New American Library |
| 1980 | Winner | Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid | Douglas Hofstadter | Basic Books |
| 1980 | Finalist | The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination | Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar | Yale University Press |
| 1980 | Finalist | The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher | Lewis Thomas | Viking |
| 1979 | Winner | On Human Nature | Edward O. Wilson | Harvard University Press |
| 1978 | Winner | The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence | Carl Sagan | Random House |
| 1977 | Winner | Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay | William W. Warner | Little, Brown |
| 1976 | Winner | Why Survive?: Being Old in America | Robert N. Butler | Harper |
| 1975 | Winner | Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | Annie Dillard | Harper's Magazine Press |
| 1974 | Winner | The Denial of Death | Ernest Becker | Free Press |
| 1973 | Co-winner | Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III | Robert Coles | Little, Brown |
| 1973 | Co-winner | Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam | Frances FitzGerald | Little, Brown |
| 1972 | Winner | Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 | Barbara W. Tuchman | Macmillan |
| 1971 | Winner | The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 | John Toland | Random House |
| 1970 | Winner | Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence | Erik Erikson | W. W. Norton |
| 1969 | Co-winner | So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events | René Dubos | Scribner |
| 1969 | Co-winner | The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History | Norman Mailer | Unknown |
| 1968 | Winner | The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution | Ariel Durant, Will Durant | Simon & Schuster |
| 1967 | Winner | The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture | David Brion Davis | Cornell University Press |
| 1966 | Winner | Wandering through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey through the North American Winter | Edwin Way Teale | Dodd, Mead & Company |
| 1965 | Winner | O Strange New World: American Culture-The Formative Years | Howard Mumford Jones | Viking |
| 1964 | Winner | Anti-Intellectualism in American Life | Richard Hofstadter | Random House |
| 1963 | Winner | The Guns of August | Barbara W. Tuchman | Macmillan |
| 1962 | Winner | The Making of the President 1960 | Theodore H. White | Atheneum |