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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 service.

Bancroft Prize Winners

2023

G-ManBeverly Gage
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century


Bad MexicansKelly Lytle Hernández
Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands


Sewing Girl's TaleJohn Wood Sweet
The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America


2022

noimageMia Bay
Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance


noimageMae Ngai
The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics


2021

noimageAndy Horowitz
Katrina: A History, 1915-2015


noimageClaudio Saunt
Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory


2020

noimageLizabeth Cohen
Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age


noimageJoseph P. Reidy
Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery


2019

noimageDavid 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


noimageDouglas Winiarski
Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England


2017

noimageAndrés Reséndez
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America


noimageHeather Ann Thompson
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy


noimageNancy Tomes
Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers


2016

noimageMary 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

noimageSven Beckert
Empire of Cotton: A Global History


noimageGreg 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

Book Cover
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

Book CoverWoody 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

Book CoverDrew 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

Book CoverRobert D. Richardson
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism


Jack Temple Kirby
Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South

2006

Book CoverSean 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

Book CoverEdward L. Ayers
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863


Book CoverSteven 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 

Book CoverAlice 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 

Book CoverDavid Nasaw
The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst


Susan Lee Johnson
Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush

2000 

Book CoverJohn Dower
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II


Linda Gordon
The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

Book CoverJames H. Merrell
Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the American Frontier


1999 

Book CoverIra 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 

Book CoverJames T. Patterson
Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974


David E. Kyvig
Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution

1996 

Book CoverAlan Taylor
William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic


Book CoverDavid 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 

Book CoverStanley 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 

Book CoverCharles 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 

Book CoverJoseph 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 

Book CoverDan 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 

Book CoverWilliam 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 

Book CoverBernard DeVoto
Across the Wide Missouri


Allan Nevins
Ordeal of the Union

Last updated May 2023 sdc