Society of American Historians

05/14/2024

We are delighted to announce the winners of our 2024 prizes!

The Tony Horwitz Prize honoring distinguished work in American history of wide appeal and enduring public significance is awarded to the Comanche author, essayist, and critic Paul Chaat Smith, Curator, Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

The Francis Parkman Prize honoring literary merit in the writing of history is given to David Waldstreicher for The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

The Allan Nevins Prize for the best-written doctoral dissertation on a significant subject in American history is awarded to Sophie FitzMaurice for “The Material Telegraph: An Environmental History of the Technology that Wired America, c. 1848-1920” (University of California, Berkeley)

09/09/2023

We are now accepting submissions for the 2024 Francis Parkman Prize for literary merit in the writing of American History and the 2024 Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize in American history. See our website for details.

THE 2024 PARKMAN AND NEVINS PRIZE COMPETITIONS ARE NOW OPEN. The 68th Annual Francis Parkman Prize Honoring Literary Merit in the Writing of American History. Purpose: To encourage and recognize the writing of history as literature. Prize: The prize, which includes a check for two thousand dollars,....

05/16/2023

We are delighted to announce the winners of our 2023 prizes:
The fourth annual Tony Horwitz Prize honoring distinguished work in American history of wide appeal and enduring public significance is awarded to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The 67th annual Francis Parkman Prize honoring literary merit in the writing of history is given to John Wood Sweet for The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America (Henry Holt)

The 17th biennial Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction is awarded to Jane Smiley for A Dangerous Business (Alfred A. Knopf).

The 63rd annual Allan Nevins Prize for the best-written doctoral dissertation on a significant subject in American history is awarded to Samantha Payne for “The Last Atlantic Revolution: Reconstruction and the Struggle for Democracy in the Americas, 1861-1912” (Harvard University).

For more info see our News page, https://sah.columbia.edu/content/2023-prize-winners

05/16/2022

We are delighted to announce the winners of our 2022 prizes:
The Tony Horwitz Prize to honor distinguished work in American history of wide appeal and enduring public significance goes to ERIC FONER, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University.

The Francis Parkman Prize honoring literary merit in the writing of history goes to NICOLE EUSTACE, Professor of History at New York University, for her book Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America (Liveright).

The Allan Nevins Dissertataion Prize goes to BENCH ANSFIELD for “Born in Flames: Arson, Racial Capitalism, and the Reinsuring of the Bronx in the Late Twentieth Century” (Yale University).

09/05/2021

Submissions for the 2022 Parkman and Nevins prizes are now closed. We will announce our winners in mid-May.

Further information about our prize competitions can be found on our website,

SUBMISSIONS FOR THE 2022 PARKMAN PRIZE COMPETITION ARE NOW CLOSED. SUBMISSIONS FOR THE NEVINS DISSERTATION PRIZE COMPETITION CLOSE ON DECEMBER 31. The next biennial Historical Fiction Prize competition, for works published in 2021 or 2022, will begin accepting submissions in the summer of 2022, with...

05/10/2021

We're delighted to announce our 2021 prizes:
the Tony Horwitz Prize to Lonnie G. Bunch III, 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution;
the Francis Parkman Prize to Christopher Tomlins for In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History (Princeton University Press);
the SAH Prize for Historical Fiction to Afia Atakora for Conjure Women (Random House);
and the Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize to Brianna Nofil for “Detention Power: Jails, Camps, and the Origins of Immigrant Incarceration, 1900-2002” (Columbia University).
See our home page for details,

To Encourage Literary Distinction in the Writing of History and Biography The Society of American Historians is delighted to announce the winners of our 2021 prizes. The Tony Horwitz Prize honoring distinguished work in American history of wide appeal and enduring public significance: Lonnie G. Bunc...

06/08/2020

We are delighted to announce the winners of our 2020 prizes:

The first annual Tony Horwitz Prize honoring distinguished work in American history of wide appeal and enduring public significance is awarded to Frances FitzGerald.

The 63rd annual Francis Parkman Prize for literary excellence in the writing of history is awarded to Charles King for Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, S*x, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (Doubleday).

The 60th annual Allan Nevins Prize for the best-written dissertation on an American subject is awarded to Robert Colby for “The Continuance of an Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South” (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill).

Because the pandemic forced us to cancel our annual dinner and prize ceremony, we have invited our winners and the chairs of the prize juries to record a version of the comments they would have made. Please join us on our SoundCloud page, https://soundcloud.com/the_sah_channel/sets/society-of-american-historians-2020-prizes, to hear their remarks and share in honoring our winners! You can also find more information about them at our News tab, https://sah.columbia.edu/news.

The SAH encourages and rewards literary merit in the writing of history. It sponsors three prize competitions: the annual Francis Parkman Prize for a nonfiction book in American history that is distin

01/01/2020

Submissions for our 2020 Parkman and Nevins prize competitions are now closed. Watch this space in May for the announcement of our winners.

05/07/2019

Our awards dinner and David Blight's talk were covered in the NY Times!

Yale University historian David W. Blight, author of a celebrated biography of Frederick Douglass, can hardly keep up with all the honors.