I f you enjoy reading books about American history , then why not consider working your way through the list of Pulitzer Prize-winning titles? From expertly constructed narratives on everything from the development of the polio vaccine to key turning points in the Revolutionary War, you’re certain to find a topic you’d like to know more about.
🏆 Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for History
The Pulitzer Prize jury declared this book to be a "breathtakingly original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston that profoundly reshapes our understanding of the city’s abolitionist legacy and the challenging reality for its Black residents." The author, Jacqueline Jones, previously won the Bancroft Prize for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow , a study of the pressures faced by Black women even after the abolition of slavery.
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🏆 Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for History
Historian Jefferson Cowie focuses on a single place—Barbour County, Alabama, the birthplace of segregationist Governor George Wallace—but in so doing offers illuminating insight into a white supremacist worldview that continues into the present day. Kirkus described it as a “powerful history showing that White supremacist ideas of freedom are deeply embedded in American politics.”
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“In the US, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for History went to two books. One is Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer, which covers 500 years of history, from just before the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the death of Fidel Castro in 2016. The book opens with Ferrer’s own departure from Cuba to New York as a baby.” Read more...
Award Winning Nonfiction Books of 2022
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“Covered with Night focuses on a single year, 1722. The Pulitzer jury described it as ‘A gripping account of Indigenous justice in early America, and how the aftermath of a settler’s murder of a Native American man led to the oldest continuously recognized treaty in the United States.'” Read more...
Award Winning Nonfiction Books of 2022
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“Marcia Chatelain contributes her perspective on how eating establishments have served as a site for black political expression and a business opportunity. One of her incredibly smart observations is that early activists for black civil rights used lunch counters as venues for protest; that’s an important part of our food history…The story of how black entrepreneurs used the predominance of fast food in their communities as an economic development opportunity is brought to light by this book. Chatelain looks at entrepreneurs who take fast food franchises and retrofit them as employment sources and gathering spots for their communities. She talks about how McDonald’s becomes a place, not just of wealth for some black entrepreneurs but also for black Americans to form communal bounds and create political movements.” Read more...
The best books on Food Studies
Matt Garcia ,
Historian
🏆 Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for History
Sweet Taste of Liberty tells the story of Henrietta Wood, an enslaved woman who was granted her liberty in 1848 but was tricked and kidnapped and had to fight for her liberty once again. What's interesting is that Caleb McDaniel, a historian at Rice University, is able to tell her story partly in her own voice, by means of interviews that she gave. After the American Civil War , Wood sued her kidnapper successfully. She received only a fraction of the money she asked for but, according to McDaniel , the award "remains the largest known sum ever granted by a U.S. court in restitution for slavery."
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🏆 Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History
In Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom historian David Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, tells the life story of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). It's an amazing story, from slavery to international celebrity and Blight goes into the many different facets and contradictions of an extraordinary man. If you're not familiar with Frederick Douglass, it's worth starting with one of his own memoirs first, like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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🏆 Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for History
A multi-award-winning environmental history of the Gulf of Mexico and the American Southern coastl—one of the most biodiverse and industrially-abused regions of the world. The Dallas Morning News hailed it as a “nonfiction epic” in the vein of Jared Diamond’s Collapse Atlantic.
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🏆 Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for History
A gripping account of the Attica prison uprising, a violent clash at the New York state prison in 1971. As the author has written : "Those who shaped Attica’s history were indeed individuals who could experience pain but also, at the same time, mete it out with ease. And thus, it was critically important to me, that readers see Attica actors not necessarily as sympathetic, but certainly as complex."
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🏆 Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History
An accomplished biography of the US military commander George Armstrong Custer, who rose to fame as a Union general during the American Civil War before his infamous death at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.
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🏆 Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History
A historical study of the Mandan people, a Plains Indian group indigenous to the Upper Missouri and who were encountered by the Lewis & Clark expedition in 1804-5. Fenn pieces together their history from the 16th century onwards, using archival scraps and archaeological evidence—"‘a mosaic," she explains, "pieced together out of stones from many quarries." The Pulitzer Prize jury described it as "an engrossing, original narrative."
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🏆 Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for History
Alan Taylor—who has won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice, as well as the prestigious Bancroft Prize—presents the fascinating story of how Black Virginians altered the course of the War of 1812, and ultimately of the whole country in the run up to the Civil War. The economist Tyler Cowen described it as "one of the best history books I have read, ever."
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🏆 Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History
The Pulitzer Prize jury described Harvard professor Logevall's Embers of War as a "balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road toward full-blown war."
NB. have an interview with Professor Logevall about the best books on John F. Kennedy .
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🏆 Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History
Manning Marable's critically acclaimed, bestselling biography of the U.S. civil rights icon "artfully strips away the layers and layers of myth that have been lacquered onto his subject’s life, first by Malcolm himself in that famous memoir, and later by both supporters and opponents after his assassination,” as Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times
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“It’s a brilliant book by one of the most brilliant historians writing about nineteenth century America. The Fiery Trial is a study of a subject that has been much debated over recent years, which is how fervently Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery and how he came to the determination to end slavery, after a life of not being so forward-leaning on the question.” Read more...
The best books on The American Civil War
Drew Gilpin Faust ,
Historian
🏆 Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History
The eighth volume in the distinguished Oxford History of the United States series. The Atlantic described What Hath God Wrought as a "comprehensive, richly detailed, and elegantly written account of the republic between the War of 1812 and the American victory in Mexico a generation later." It is, it declared, "a masterpiece."
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🏆 Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for History
A meticulously researched account of how the revelations of American newsmen—Black and white—forced the civil rights agenda and transformed 20th-century U.S. society.
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“What I find so impressive about this book is that Oshinsky really does cover the whole history of a disease but does so in a way that you never feel you’re getting a CliffsNotes version. It’s a pretty unwieldy topic: you could write an entire book just about the year the polio vaccine was rolled out, or what happened since then, or you could write a book, as Paul Offit did, just about the Cutter incident. All the way through Polio you feel like you are getting all the details you would want or need. To combine that much information in a way that was not only accessible and exciting and readable but also scientifically rigorous was a real, real accomplishment.” Read more...
The Best Vaccine Books
Seth Mnookin ,
Science Writer
🏆 Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for History
A dramatic narrative of a pivotal moment in the American Revolutionary War—George Washington's crossing the Delaware River. The New Yorker said: "Fisher's thoughtful account describes how Washington, in a frantic, desparate month, turned his collection of troops into a professional force, not by emulating Europeans but by coming up with a model that was distinctly American."
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🏆 Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for History
In The Nation, George M. Frederickson described A Nation Under Our Feet as " the most comprehensive account yet of black politics in the rural South before, during and after the Civil War." Hahn’s book "is one of the most important works in American social history to appear in recent years"—"a major achievement and a landmark in African-American history.”
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🏆 Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for History
An Army at Dawn is volume 1 of The Liberation Trilogy
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“I would actually recommend the whole Liberation Trilogy , because they’re all excellent and he means for you to read them together…His point is that you cannot understand the success in Europe unless you watch the countries building their military from North Africa on—particularly the United States, which was totally unprepared to go into World War Two…What makes Atkinson so good is he tells two stories at the same time, and shows how they influence one another. There is the story of these men. And you get letters and so forth, he singles out maybe three as the key ones that you keep going back to. And that’s partly so when, inevitably, one of them dies, you’re just sad. But then he also talks about the commanders and that’s the second theme in the book.” Read more...
Best Books for History Reading Groups
Donna McBride ,
Historian
“It’s a beautifully crafted group biography about the birth of the first American school of philosophy – pragmatism. Pragmatism is an idea about ideas. The gist is to assess theories based on their efficacy. Menand describes ideas as being like microchips or screwdrivers, tools that help us achieve results. That concept sprung from this generation. So, the four figures it tells this birth story through are Oliver Wendell Holmes, who became the legal embodiment of pragmatism, William James, who is the philosopher of pragmatism, Charles Pierce, who was James’s mentor, and John Dewey, who made James’s ideas more coherent and more part of popular conversation.” Read more...
The best books on The Roots of Liberalism
Franklin Foer ,
Journalist
“He’s very bold and brave because what he does in looking at the period just after the American Revolution is, instead of writing a massive 700-page book, he just gives you seven events which will tell you everything you need to know. So, in terms of narrative structure, it’s a great book.” Read more...
The best books on Horticulture
Andrea Wulf ,
Historian
“In Freedom from Fear , Kennedy condenses—into one very large volume—the story of how Roosevelt brought the country out of the Great Depression and into World War II. He begins in the Hoover years and explores some of the structural problems with the economy. He takes you right through the New Deal years, including the failure of New Deal programs during the late 1930s when political opposition mounted. And he carries you all the way through World War II and the early years of the Cold War that immediately followed.” Read more...
The best books on Franklin D. Roosevelt
Cynthia Koch ,
Historian
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