| Year
|
Author(s)
|
Book
|
Award
|
| 1962
|
Theodore H. White
|
The Making of the President 1960
|
Winner
|
| 1963
|
Barbara W. Tuchman
|
The Guns of August
|
Winner
|
| 1964
|
Richard Hofstadter
|
Anti-intellectualism in American Life
|
Winner
|
| 1965
|
Howard Mumford Jones
|
O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years
|
Winner
|
| 1966
|
Edwin Way Teale
|
Wandering Through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey Through the North American Winter
|
Winner
|
| 1967
|
David Brion Davis
|
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
|
Winner
|
| 1968
|
Will Durant and Ariel Durant
|
The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution
|
Winner
|
| 1969
|
René Jules Dubos
|
So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events
|
Winner
|
| Norman Mailer
|
The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History
|
Winner
|
| 1970
|
Erik H. Erikson
|
Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence
|
Winner
|
| 1971
|
John Toland
|
The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945
|
Winner
|
| 1972
|
Barbara W. Tuchman
|
Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45
|
Winner
|
| 1973
|
Robert Coles
|
Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III
|
Winner
|
| Frances FitzGerald
|
Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
|
Winner
|
| 1974
|
Ernest Becker
|
The Denial of Death
|
Winner
|
| 1975
|
Annie Dillard
|
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
|
Winner
|
| 1976
|
Robert N. Butler
|
Why Survive? Being Old in America
|
Winner
|
| 1977
|
William W. Warner
|
Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay
|
Winner
|
| 1978
|
Carl Sagan
|
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
|
Winner
|
| 1979
|
Edward O. Wilson
|
On Human Nature
|
Winner
|
| 1980
|
Douglas R. Hofstadter
|
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
|
Winner
|
| Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
|
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
|
Finalist
|
| Lewis Thomas
|
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
|
Finalist
|
| 1981
|
Carl E. Schorske
|
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
|
Winner
|
| Maxine Hong Kingston
|
China Men
|
Finalist
|
| William Manchester
|
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War
|
Finalist
|
| Marshall Frady
|
Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey
|
Finalist
|
| 1982
|
Tracy Kidder
|
The Soul of a New Machine
|
Winner
|
| John McPhee
|
Basin and Range
|
Finalist
|
| Diana Trilling
|
Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor
|
Finalist
|
| 1983
|
Susan Sheehan
|
Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
|
Winner
|
| Diane Johnson
|
Terrorists and Novelists
|
Finalist
|
| Jonathan Schell
|
The Fate of the Earth
|
Finalist
|
| 1984
|
Paul Starr
|
The Social Transformation of American Medicine
|
Winner
|
| Winston Groom and Duncan Spencer
|
Conversations with the Enemy
|
Finalist
|
| Susan Jacoby
|
Wild Justice
|
Finalist
|
| 1985
|
Studs Terkel
|
The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two
|
Winner
|
| Donald Keene
|
Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era
|
Finalist
|
| Jonathan Kwitny
|
Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World
|
Finalist
|
| 1986
|
J. Anthony Lukas
|
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
|
Winner
|
| Joseph Lelyveld
|
Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White
|
Winner
|
| Robert N. Bellah
|
Habits and the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
|
Finalist
|
| 1987
|
David K. Shipler
|
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land
|
Winner
|
| Cyra McFadden
|
Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir
|
Finalist
|
| John McPhee
|
Rising from the Plains
|
Finalist
|
| 1988
|
Richard Rhodes
|
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
|
Winner
|
| James Gleick
|
Chaos: Making a New Science
|
Finalist
|
| Daniel Callahan
|
Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society
|
Finalist
|
| 1989
|
Neil Sheehan
|
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
|
Winner
|
| Timothy Ferris
|
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
|
Finalist
|
| McGeorge Bundy
|
Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years
|
Finalist
|
| Howard Kohn
|
The Last Farmer
|
Finalist
|
| 1990
|
Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson
|
And Their Children After Them
|
Winner
|
| David Fromkin
|
A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922
|
Finalist
|
| Stephen Jay Gould
|
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
|
Finalist
|
| 1991
|
Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson
|
The Ants
|
Winner
|
| John McPhee
|
Looking for a Ship
|
Finalist
|
| William duBuys and Alex Harris
|
River of Traps: A Village Life
|
Finalist
|
| 1992
|
Daniel Yergin
|
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
|
Winner
|
| Andre Dubus
|
Broken Vessels
|
Finalist
|
| Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall
|
Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics
|
Finalist
|
| 1993
|
Garry Wills
|
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America
|
Winner
|
| Susan Griffin
|
A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
|
Finalist
|
| Richard Rodriguez
|
Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father
|
Finalist
|
| Anne Matthews
|
Where the Buffalo Roam: Restoring America's Great Plains
|
Finalist
|
| 1994
|
David Remnick
|
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
|
Winner
|
| Peter Gay
|
The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud
|
Finalist
|
| John Lukacs
|
The End of the Twentieth Century: And the End of the Modern Age
|
Finalist
|
| 1995
|
Jonathan Weiner
|
The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time
|
Winner
|
| Sherwin B. Nuland
|
How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
|
Finalist
|
| John Berendt
|
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story
|
Finalist
|
| 1996
|
Tina Rosenberg
|
The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism
|
Winner
|
| Daniel C. Dennett
|
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and The Meanings of Life
|
Finalist
|
| Lawrence Weschler
|
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology
|
Finalist
|
| 1997
|
Richard Kluger
|
Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
|
Winner
|
| Cynthia Ozick
|
Fame and Folly
|
Finalist
|
| Samuel G. Freedman
|
The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond
|
Finalist
|
| 1998
|
Jared Diamond
|
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
|
Winner
|
| Steven Pinker
|
How the Mind Works
|
Finalist
|
| Jon Krakauer
|
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster
|
Finalist
|
| 1999
|
John McPhee
|
Annals of the Former World
|
Winner
|
| Elliott Currie
|
Crime and Punishment in America
|
Finalist
|
| Judith Rich Harris
|
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do
|
Finalist
|
| 2000
|
John W. Dower
|
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
|
Winner
|
| Scott Weidensaul
|
Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds
|
Finalist
|
| Brian Greene
|
The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
|
Finalist
|
| 2001
|
Herbert P. Bix
|
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
|
Winner
|
| Dave Eggers
|
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
|
Finalist
|
| Ted Conover
|
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
|
Finalist
|
| 2002
|
Diane McWhorter
|
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
|
Winner
|
| Andrew Solomon
|
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
|
Finalist
|
| David Halberstam
|
War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals
|
Finalist
|
| 2003
|
Samantha Power
|
"A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide
|
Winner
|
| Ellen Meloy
|
The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit
|
Finalist
|
| Steven Pinker
|
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
|
Finalist
|
| 2004
|
Anne Applebaum
|
Gulag: A History
|
Winner
|
| Steven Nadler
|
Rembrandt's Jews
|
Finalist
|
| Dana Priest
|
The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military
|
Finalist
|
| 2005
|
Steve Coll
|
Ghost Wars
|
Winner
|
| Suketu Mehta
|
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
|
Finalist
|
| Luis Alberto Urrea
|
The Devil's Highway: A True Story
|
Finalist
|
| 2006
|
Caroline Elkins
|
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya
|
Winner
|
| Tony Judt
|
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
|
Finalist
|
| George Packer
|
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
|
Finalist
|
| 2007
|
Lawrence Wright
|
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
|
Winner
|
| Pete Earley
|
Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness
|
Finalist
|
| Thomas E. Ricks
|
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
|
Finalist
|
| 2008
|
Saul Friedländer
|
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945
|
Winner
|
| Allan Brandt
|
The Cigarette Century
|
Finalist
|
| Alex Ross
|
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
|
Finalist
|
| 2009
|
Douglas A. Blackmon
|
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
|
Winner
|
| Arthur Herman
|
Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age
|
Finalist
|
| William I. Hitchcock
|
The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe
|
Finalist
|
| 2010
|
David E. Hoffman
|
The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
|
Winner
|
| John Cassidy
|
How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
|
Finalist
|
| Robert Wright
|
The Evolution of God
|
Finalist
|
| 2011
|
Siddhartha Mukherjee
|
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
|
Winner
|
| S.C. Gwynne
|
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
|
Finalist
|
| Nicholas G. Carr
|
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
|
Finalist
|
| 2012
|
Stephen Greenblatt
|
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
|
Winner
|
| Diane Ackerman
|
One Hundred Names For Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing
|
Finalist
|
| Mara Hvistendahl
|
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men
|
Finalist
|
| 2013
|
Gilbert King
|
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
|
Winner
|
| Katherine Boo
|
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
|
Finalist
|
| David George Haskell
|
The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
|
Finalist
|
| 2014
|
Dan Fagin
|
Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
|
Winner
|
| Gary J. Bass
|
The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide
|
Finalist
|
| Fred Kaplan
|
The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War
|
Finalist
|
| 2015
|
Elizabeth Kolbert
|
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
|
Winner
|
| Evan Osnos
|
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
|
Finalist
|
| Anand Gopal
|
No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes
|
Finalist
|
| 2016
|
Joby Warrick
|
Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS
|
Winner
|
| Ta-Nehisi Coates
|
Between the World and Me
|
Finalist
|
| Carla Power
|
If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran
|
Finalist
|
| 2017
|
Matthew Desmond
|
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
|
Winner
|
| John Donvan and Caren Zucker
|
In a Different Key: The Story of Autism
|
Finalist
|
| Micki McElya
|
The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery
|
Finalist
|
| 2018
|
James Forman Jr.
|
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
|
Winner
|
| Suzy Hansen
|
Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-America World
|
Finalist
|
| Richard O. Prum
|
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us
|
Finalist
|
| 2019
|
Eliza Griswold
|
Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America
|
Winner
|
| Bernice Yeung
|
In a Day's Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America's Most Vulnerable Workers
|
Finalist
|
| Elizabeth Rush
|
Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
|
Finalist
|
| 2020
|
Greg Grandin
|
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
|
Winner
|
| Anne Boyer
|
The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
|
Winner
|
| Louise Aronson
|
Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life
|
Finalist
|
| Albert Woodfox with Leslie George
|
Solitary
|
Finalist
|
| 2021
|
David Zucchino
|
Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
|
Winner
|
| Cathy Park Hong
|
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
|
Finalist
|
| Sierra Crane Murdoch
|
Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country
|
Finalist
|
| 2022
|
Andrea Elliott
|
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City
|
Winner
|
| Carla Power
|
Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism
|
Finalist
|
| Joshua Prager
|
The Family Roe: An American Story
|
Finalist
|
| 2023
|
Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa
|
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
|
Winner
|
| Jing Tsu
|
Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
|
Finalist
|
| David George Haskell
|
Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction
|
Finalist
|
| Linda Villarosa
|
Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation
|
Finalist
|
| 2024
|
Nathan Thrall
|
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
|
Winner
|
| John Vaillant
|
Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World
|
Finalist
|
| Siddharth Kara
|
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
|
Finalist
|
