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 service.
2023
Beverly Gage
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
Kelly Lytle Hernández
Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands
John Wood Sweet
The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America
2022
Mia Bay
Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance
Mae Ngai
The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics
2021
Andy Horowitz
Katrina: A History, 1915-2015
Claudio Saunt
Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
2020
Lizabeth Cohen
Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age
Joseph P. Reidy
Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery
2019
David W. Blight
Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom
Lisa Brooks
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War
2018
Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio
Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific – 1944-1945
Louis S. Warren
God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America
Douglas Winiarski
Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England
2017
Andrés Reséndez
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
Heather Ann Thompson
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
Nancy Tomes
Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers
2016
Mary Sarah Bilder
Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention
Andrew Lipman
The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast
Deborah Rosen
Border Law: The First Seminole War and American Nationhood
2015
Sven Beckert
Empire of Cotton: A Global History
Greg Grandin
The Empire of Necessity
2014
Ira Katznelson
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
Ari Kelman
A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek
2013
W. Jeffrey Bolster
The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
John Fabian Witt
Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History
2012
Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement
Anne F. Hyde
Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860
Daniel T. Rodgers
Age of Fracture
2011
Eric Foner
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
Sarah Dubow
Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America
Christopher Tomlins
Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America
2010
Woody Holton
Abigail Adams
Linda Gordon
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
Margaret D. Jacobs
White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940
2009
Drew Gilpin Faust
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Thomas G. Andrews
Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor 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