The Bancroft Prize

The Bancroft Prizes are awarded each year by Columbia University in New York City. Under the terms of the will of the late Fredric Bancroft, a provision is made for two annual prizes of equal rank, to be awarded to the authors of distinguished works in either or both of the following categories: American History and Diplomacy. Although works about American history may be about any of the Americas (North, Central, South), the works must have been published in the English language or be available in an English translation.

For more information, please visit the Official Bancroft Prize Web site. All books owned by Lincoln City Libraries are hotlinked to their entries in our library catalog, so that you may check on their current availability. If you see a title on this list that is not hotlinked to our collection, please consider ordering it through our Interlibrary Loan department.

2009		Thomas G. Andrews Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War		Drew Gilpin Faust This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War Peka Hamalainen The Comanche Empire
2008		Allan M. Brandt The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America		Charles Postel The Populist Vision Peter Silver Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America
2007		Robert D. Richardson William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism		Jack Temple Kirby Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South
2006		Sean Wilentz The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln		Erskine Clarke Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic
		Odd Arne Westad The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
2005		Melvin Patrick Ely Israel on the Appomatox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom From the 1790s Throught the Civil War		Michael O'Brien Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South
		Michael J. Klarman From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality
2004		Edward L. Ayers In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863		Steven Hahn A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration
		George M. Marsden Jonathan Edwards: A Life
2003		James F. Brooks Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands		Alan Gallay The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717
2002		Alice Kessler-Harris In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America		David W. Blight Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
2001		David Nasaw The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst		Susan Lee Johnson Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush
2000		John Dower Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II		Linda Gordon The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
		James H. Merrell Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the American Frontier
1999		Ira Berlin Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America		Philip D. Morgan Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country
		Jill Lepore The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
1998		Christine Leigh Heyrman Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt		Walter LeFeber The Clash: A History of U.S.-Japan Relations
		Thomas J. Sugrue The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
1997		James T. Patterson Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974		David E. Kyvig Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution
1996		Alan Taylor William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic		David S. Reynolds Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography
1995		John L. Brooke The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology		John Dittmer Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
1994		Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800		Winthrop D. Jordan Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy
		David Levering Lewis The Biography of a Race
1993		Melvin P. Leffler A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War		Charles Capper Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life: Volume 1: The Private Years
1992		Charles Royster The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans		William Cronon Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
1991		Lizabeth Cohen Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939		Laurel Thatcher Ulrich A Midwife's tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812
1990		James H. Merrell The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors From European Contact Through the Era of Removal		Neal R. McMillen Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow
1989		Eric Foner Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution: 1863-1877		Edmund S. Morgan Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America
1988		Peter Kolchin Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom		Michael S. Sherry The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon
1987		Thomas Doerflinger A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia		Roger Lane Roots of Violence in Black Philadelpha, 1860-1900
1986		Jacqueline Jones Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family From Slavery to the Present		Kenneth T. Jackson Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
1985		Kenneth Silverman The Life and Timese of Cotton Mather		Suzanne Lebsock The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town
1984		Louis R. Harlan Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915		Paul Starr The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry
1983		John Putnam Demos Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England		Nick Salvatore Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist
1982		Edward Countryman A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790		Mary P. Ryan Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York
1981		Ronald Steel Walter Lipmann and the American Century		Jean Strouse Alice James: A Biography
1980		Robert Dallek Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945		Thomas Dublin Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860
		Donald Worster Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
1979		Christopher Thorne Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945		Anthony F.C. Wallace Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution
1978		Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business		Morton J. Horwitz The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860
1977		Alan Dawley Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn		Robert A. Gross The Minutemen and Their World
		Barry W. Higman Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834
1976		David Brion Davis The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823		R.W.B. Lewis Edith Wharton: A Biography
1975		Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery and Time on the Cross: Evidence and Methods -- a Supplement		Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke Deterrence in American Foreign Policy
		Eugene Genovese Roll, Jordan, Roll
1974		Ray Allen Billington Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher		Townsend Hoopes The Devil and John Foster Dulles
		Stephan Thernstrom The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970
1973		Frances Fitzgerald Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam		John Lewis Gaddis The United States and the Origins of the Cold War
1972		Carl N. Degler Neither Black Nor White		Robert Middlekauff The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
		Samuel Eliot Morison The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages
1971		Joseph Frazier Wall Andrew Carnegie		Eric Barnouw The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, Volume III -- From 1953
		David M. Kennedy Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger
1970		Dan T. Carter Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South		Charles Coleman Sellers Charles Wilson Peale
		Gordon S. Wood The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787
1969		Winthrop D. Jordan White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812		N. Gordon Levine, Jr. Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution
		Rexford Guy Tugwell The Brains Trust
1968		Henry Allen Bullock A History of Negro Education in the South From 1619 to the Present		Richard L. Bushman From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765
		Bernard Bailyn The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
1967		William W. Freehling Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836		Charles Sellers James K. Polk, Continentalist, 1843-1846
		James Sterling Young The Washington Community, 1800-1828
1966		Richard B. Morris The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence		Theodore W. Friend III Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1926-1946
1965		Bradford Perkins Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812-1823		William B. Willcox Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence
		Dorothy Borg The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938
1964		William E. Leuchtenberg Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940		John L. Thomas The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison
		Paul Seabury Power, Freedom and Diplomacy: The Foreign Policy of the United States of America
1963		Page Smith John Adams		Roberta Wohlstetter Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision
		John C. Stoessinger The Might of Nations: World Politics in Our Time
1962		Lawrence A. Cremin The Transformation of the School		Felix Gilbert To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy
		Martin B. Duberman Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1866
1961		Merrill D. Peterson The Jefferson Image in the American Mind		Arthur S. Link Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality, 1914-1915
1960		Margaret Leech In the Days of McKinley		R.R. Palmer The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800
1959		Daniel J. Boorstein The Americans: The Colonial Experience		Ernest Samuels Henry Adams: The Middle Years
1958		Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The Crisis of the Old Order		Frank Luther Mott A History of American Magazines, Volume IV
1957		George F. Kennan Russia Leaves the War		Arthur S. Link Wilson: The New Freedom
1956		Elizabeth Stevenson Henry Adams		J.G. Randall and Richard N. Current Last Full Measure: Lincoln the President
1955		Paul Horgan Great River: The Rio Grande		Leonard D. White The Jacksonians
1954		Clinton Rossiter Seedtime of the Republic		William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason The Undeclared War
1953		George Dangerfield The Era of Good Feelings		Eric F. Goldman Rendezvous With Destiny
1952		Merlo J. Pusey Charles Evans Hughes		C. Vann Woodward Origins of the New South, 1877-1913
1951		Henry N. Smith Virgin Land		Arthur N. Holcombe Our More Perfect Union
1950		Herbert E. Bolton Coronado		Lawrence H. Gipson The Great War for the Empire: Volume VII: The Victorious Years
1949		Robert E. Sherwood Roosevelt and Hopkins		Samuel E. Morrison The Rising Sun in the Pacific
1948		Bernard DeVoto Across the Wide Missouri		Allan Nevins Ordeal of the Union