The
New-York Historical Society
The New-York Historical Society is an American history museum and library in New York City, along Central Park West between 76th and 77th Streets, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The society was founded in 1804 as New York's first museum ...
gives three book prizes annually. From 2005 to 2012 there was one award for American history. A second award was added in 2013 for
children's history. A third award was added in 2016 for
military history
Military history is the study of War, armed conflict in the Human history, history of humanity, and its impact on the societies, cultures and economies thereof, as well as the resulting changes to Politics, local and international relationships.
...
.
Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History
The Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History, prior to 2016 known as The New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize or, simply, the American History Book Prize, is an American
literary award
A literary award or literary prize is an award presented in recognition of a particularly lauded literary piece or body of work. It is normally presented to an author.
Organizations
Most literary awards come with a corresponding award ceremony. M ...
given annually by the
New-York Historical Society
The New-York Historical Society is an American history museum and library in New York City, along Central Park West between 76th and 77th Streets, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The society was founded in 1804 as New York's first museum ...
for an adult non-fiction book on
American history
The history of the lands that became the United States began with the arrival of the first people in the Americas around 15,000 BC. Numerous indigenous cultures formed, and many saw transformations in the 16th century away from more densel ...
or
biography
A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or c ...
, copyrighted in the year of the award, "that is distinguished by its scholarship, its literary style and its appeal to a general as well as an academic audience."
[The New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize. THE 6th ANNUAL COMPETITION]
(2010) The winner receives an engraved medal, $50,000 cash and the unofficial title of American Historian Laureate.
[ The inaugural award was presented in 2006 for books published in 2005.
]
Winners
Date is year when books were published; the following year is when the award was given. Thus the inaugural award was given in 2006 for ''Team of Rivals'' published in 2005.
*2005 Doris Kearns Goodwin
Doris Helen Kearns Goodwin (born January 4, 1943) is an American biographer, historian, former sports journalist, and political commentator. She has written biographies of several U.S. presidents, including ''Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream ...
, '' Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln''
*2006 David Nasaw
David Nasaw (born July 18, 1945) is an American author, biographer and historian who specializes in the cultural, social and business history of early 20th Century America. Nasaw is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University o ...
, ''Andrew Carnegie'' (biography of Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie (, ; November 25, 1835August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist. Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and became one of the richest Americans in ...
)
*2007 Daniel Walker Howe
Daniel Walker Howe (born January 10, 1937) is an American historian who specializes in the early national period of U.S. history, with a particular interest in its intellectual and religious dimensions. He was Rhodes Professor of American Histo ...
, '' What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848''
*2008 Drew Gilpin Faust
Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust (born September 18, 1947) is an American historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. She was Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or gradu ...
, '' This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War''
*2009 Gordon S. Wood
Gordon Stewart Wood (born November 27, 1933) is an American historian and professor at Brown University. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for '' The Radicalism of the American Revolution'' (1992). His book ''The Creation o ...
, '' Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815''
*2010 Ron Chernow
Ronald Chernow (; born March 3, 1949) is an American writer, journalist and biographer. He has written bestselling historical non-fiction biographies.
He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2011 American History Book Prize for hi ...
, '' Washington: A Life'' (biography of George Washington
George Washington (February 22, 1732, 1799) was an American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Appointed by the Continental Congress as commander of ...
)
*2011 John Lewis Gaddis, ''George F. Kennan: An American Life'' (biography of George F. Kennan
George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly hist ...
)
*2012 Robert Caro
Robert Allan Caro (born October 30, 1935) is an American journalist and author known for his biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson.
After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote '' The Power ...
, '' The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson''
*2013 Andrew O'Shaughnessy, ''The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire''
*2014 Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is an American historian and journalist. She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at '' The New Yorker'', where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about America ...
, ''The Secret History of Wonder Woman''
*2015 Eric Foner
Eric Foner (; born February 7, 1943) is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African-American biography, the American Civil War, Reconstruc ...
, ''Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad''
*2016 Jane Kamensky
Jane Kamensky, an American historian, is a professor of history at Harvard University. She is also the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library.
Kamensky graduated from Yale University in 1985 with a B.A., and i ...
, ''A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley''
*2017 John A. Farrell, ''Richard Nixon: The Life''
*2018 Benn Steil
Benn Steil is an American economist and writer. He was educated at Nuffield College, Oxford and at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Steil is the senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign ...
, ''The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War''
*2019 Rick Atkinson
Lawrence Rush "Rick" Atkinson IV (born November 15, 1952) is an American author, most recently of ''The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777'', the first volume in the Revolution Trilogy. He has won Pulit ...
, ''The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777''
*2020 Tracy Campbell, ''The Year of Peril: America in 1942''
*2021 Alan Taylor, ''American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850''
New-York Historical Society Children's History Book Prize
The New-York Historical Society Children's History Book Prize was first award in 2013 for the best children's historical literature.
Winners
* 2013 Kristin Levine, ''The Lions of Little Rock''
* 2014 Helen Frost
Helen Marie Frost (born March 4, 1949) is an American writer and poet. She is best known for the young-adult novel ''Keesha's House'', which was a Michael L. Printz Award honor book in 2004.
Frost was born in South Dakota
South Dakota ( ...
, ''Salt: A Story of Friendship in a Time of War''
* 2015 Pam Muñoz Ryan, ''Echo''
* 2016 Ann E. Burg, ''Unbound: A Novel in Verse''
* 2016 Firoozeh Dumas, ''It Ain’t So Awful Falafel''
* 2017 Laura Atkins and Stan Yogi (Authors), Yutaka Houlette (Illustrator), ''Fred Korematsu Speaks Up''
* 2018 Ellen Klages
Ellen Klages (, ; born 1954) is an American science, science fiction and historical fiction writer who lives in San Francisco. Her novelette "Basement Magic" won the 2005 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. She had previously been nominated for H ...
, ''Out of Left Field''
* 2019 Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Erica Armstrong Dunbar is an American historian at Rutgers University. She is a distinguished Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers. An historian of African American women and the antebellum United States, Dunbar is the author o ...
and Kathleen Van Cleve, ''Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge''
Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History
The Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History at the New-York Historical Society was first awarded in 2016 for the best book on military history in the English-speaking world. Prior to 2016, the prize was known as the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, established in 2013 by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation was established by Harry Guggenheim to support research on violence, aggression, and dominance.
The foundation writes: "He was convinced that solid, thoughtful, scholarly and scientific research, experimentati ...
, the inaugural prize was awarded in February 2014. The purpose of the prize is to increase public attention to military history for educational purposes.
Winners
* 2013 Allen C. Guelzo
Allen Carl Guelzo (born 1953) is an American historian who serves as Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He f ...
, ''Gettysburg: The Last Invasion'' 'David L. Preston
David L. Preston is an American historian, writer, and professor. He is the author of two books on conflict between English colonists in North America and their French and Native American neighbors, which have won multiple awards. He currently s ...
, '' Braddock's Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution''
* 2016 Peter Cozzens, '' The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West''Andrew Lambert
Andrew Lambert (born 31 December 1956) is a British naval historian, who since 2001 has been the Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies, King's College London.
Academic career
After completing his doctoral resear ...
, ''Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World''
*2019 John C. McManus, ''Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941–1943 ''
*2020 Alexander Mikaberidze
Alexander Mikaberidze ( ka, ალექსანდრე მიქაბერიძე; born 27 January 1978) is a Georgian lawyer, author and historian who specializes in Napoleonic studies. He is a full professor of history and social scie ...
, ''The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History''
*2021 Kevin J. Weddle, ''The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution''
See also
* List of history awards
This list of history awards covers notable awards given to persons, a group of persons, or institutions, for their contribution to the study of history. It is organized by region. The entries name the prize and sponsoring organization, give notes ...
References
{{Reflist
External links
Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History
official website.
Awards established in 2006
Awards established in 2014
2006 establishments in New York (state)
Biography awards
American history awards
American non-fiction literary awards
2014 establishments in New York (state)