Awards & Winners

Bancroft Prize

Bancroft Prize

The Bancroft Prize is awarded each year by the trustees of Columbia University for books about diplomacy or the history of the Americas. It was established in 1948 by a bequest from Frederic Bancroft. The prize has been generally considered to be among the most prestigious awards in the field of American history writing and comes with a $10,000 stipend. Seventeen winners had their work supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and 16 winners were also recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for History. The prize was affected by the post-award controversy involving the scholarship of Michael A. Bellesiles, who received the prize for his work in 2001. Following independent investigations, Columbia University rescinded the prize for the first time.
Date Established : 1948

Check all the winners of Bancroft Prize presented under Bancroft Prize since 1948 .


Linda Gordon

Honored for : Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

Woody Holton

Honored for : Abigail Adams

Margaret D. Jacobs

Honored for : White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940.

Drew Gilpin Faust

Honored for : This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Pekka Hämäläinen

Honored for : The Comanche Empire

Thomas G. Andrews

Honored for : Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War

Allan M. Brandt

Honored for : The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America

Charles Postel

Honored for : The Populist Vision

Peter Silver

Honored for : Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America

Robert D. Richardson

Honored for : William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

Jack T. Kirby

Honored for : Mockingbird Song

Sean Wilentz

Honored for : The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

Odd Arne Westad

Honored for : The Global Cold War

Erskine Clarke

Honored for : Dwelling Place

Michael O'Brien

Honored for : Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810\u20131860

Melvin Patrick Ely

Honored for : Israel on the Appomattox

Michael Klarman

Honored for : From Jim Crow to Civil Rights

Steven Hahn

Honored for : A Nation Under Our Feet

George Marsden

Honored for : Jonathan Edwards

Edward L. Ayers

Honored for : In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859\u20131863

Alan Gallay

Honored for : The Indian Slave Trade

James F. Brooks

Honored for : Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands

Alice Kessler-Harris

Honored for : In Pursuit of Equity

David W. Blight

Honored for : Race and Reunion

David Nasaw

Honored for : The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst

Susan Lee Johnson

Honored for : Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush

John W. Dower

Honored for : Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

Linda Gordon

Honored for : The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

James Merrell

Honored for : Into the American Woods

Ira Berlin

Honored for : Many Thousands Gone

Jill Lepore

Honored for : The Name of War

Philip D. Morgan

Honored for : A Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country

Thomas Sugrue

Honored for : The Origins of the Urban Crisis

Walter LaFeber

Honored for : The Clash

Christine Leigh Heyrman

Honored for : Southern Cross

James T. Patterson

Honored for : Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

David E. Kyvig

Honored for : Explicit and Authentic Acts

Alan Taylor

Honored for : William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic

David S. Reynolds

Honored for : Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

John L. Brooke

Honored for : The Refiner's Fire

John Dittmer

Honored for : Local People

Winthrop Jordan

Honored for : Tumult and Silence at Second Creek

David Levering Lewis

Honored for : W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919

Stanley Elkins

Honored for : The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788 - 1800

Charles Capper

Honored for : Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 1: The Private Years

Melvyn P. Leffler

Honored for : A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War

Charles Royster

Honored for : The Destructive War

William Cronon

Honored for : Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Honored for : A Midwife's Tale

Lizabeth Cohen

Honored for : Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939

James Merrell

Honored for : The Indians' New World

Neil R. McMillen

Honored for : Dark Journey

Edmund Morgan

Honored for : Inventing the People

Eric Foner

Honored for : Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

Michael S. Sherry

Honored for : The Rise of American Air Power

Peter Kolchin

Honored for : Unfree Labor

Roger Lane

Honored for : Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900

Thomas Doerflinger

Honored for : A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia

Kenneth T. Jackson

Honored for : Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States

Jacqueline Jones

Honored for : Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow

Kenneth Silverman

Honored for : The Life and Times of Cotton Mather

Suzanne Lebsock

Honored for : The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784\u20131860

Paul Starr

Honored for : The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry

Louis R. Harlan

Honored for : Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee

John Putnam Demos

Honored for : Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England

Nick Salvatore

Honored for : Eugene V. Debs

Mary P. Ryan

Honored for : Cradle of the Middle Class

Edward Countryman

Honored for : A People in Revolution

Ronald Steel

Honored for : Walter Lippmann and the American Century

Jean Strouse

Honored for : Alice James, A Biography

Robert Dallek

Honored for : Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945

Donald Worster

Honored for : Dust Bowl

Thomas Dublin

Honored for : Women at Work

Anthony F. C. Wallace

Honored for : Rockdale

Christopher Thorne

Honored for : Allies of A Kind

Morton Horwitz

Honored for : The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

Honored for : The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business

Alan Dawley

Honored for : Class and Community

Robert A. Gross

Honored for : The Minutemen and Their World

Barry W. Higman

Honored for : Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807\u20131834

David Brion Davis

Honored for : The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823

R. W. B. Lewis

Honored for : Edith Wharton: A Biography

Eugene Genovese

Honored for : Roll, Jordan, Roll

Robert Fogel

Honored for : Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery

Richard Smoke, Alexander L. George

Honored for : Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice

Stanley Engerman

Honored for : Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery

Ray Allen Billington

Honored for : Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher

Stephan Thernstrom

Honored for : The Other Bostonians, Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970

Townsend Hoopes

Honored for : The Devil and John Foster Dulles

Frances FitzGerald

Honored for : Fire in the Lake

John Lewis Gaddis

Honored for : The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947

Louis R. Harlan

Honored for : Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee

Samuel Eliot Morison

Honored for : The European Discovery of America

Robert Middlekauff

Honored for : The Mathers

Carl N. Degler

Honored for : Neither Black nor white

Joseph Frazier Wall

Honored for : Andrew Carnegie

Erik Barnouw

Honored for : The Image Empire : A History of Broadcasting in the United States

David M. Kennedy

Honored for : Birth Control in America

Gordon S. Wood

Honored for : The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

Dan T. Carter

Honored for : Scottsboro

Charles Sellers

Honored for : Charles Willson Peale

Winthrop Jordan

Honored for : White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812

Norman Gordon Levin, Jr.

Honored for : Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution

Rexford Tugwell

Honored for : The Brains Trust

Bernard Bailyn

Honored for : The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Richard Bushman

Honored for : From Puritan to Yankee; Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765

Henry Allen Bullock

Honored for : A History of Negro Education in the South from 1619 to the Present

James Sterling Young

Honored for : The Washington Community, 1800-1828

William W. Freehling

Honored for : Prelude to Civil War

Charles Sellers

Honored for : James K. Polk, Continentalist, 1843\u20131846. Vol. II

Richard Brandon Morris

Honored for : The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence

Theodore Friend

Honored for : Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1929\u20131946

Bradford Perkins

Honored for : Castlereagh and Adams

William Bradford Willcox

Honored for : Portrait of A General

Dorothy Borg

Honored for : The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933\u20131938

Paul Seabury

Honored for : Power, Freedom, and Diplomacy

William Leuchtenburg

Honored for : Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940

John L. Thomas

Honored for : The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison

Roberta Wohlstetter

Honored for : Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision

Page Smith

Honored for : John Adams

John G. Stoessinger

Honored for : Might of Nations

Felix Gilbert

Honored for : To the Farewell Address

Lawrence Cremin

Honored for : The Transformation of the School

Martin Duberman

Honored for : Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1886

Arthur S. Link

Honored for : Wilson

Merrill D. Peterson

Honored for : The Jefferson Image in the American Mind

Margaret Leech

Honored for : In the Days of McKinley

Robert Roswell Palmer

Honored for : Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe & America, 1760-1800, Volume 1 - The Challenge

Daniel J. Boorstin

Honored for : The Americans: The Colonial Experience

Ernest Samuels

Honored for : Henry Adams

Frank Luther Mott

Honored for : A History of American Magazines

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Honored for : The Crisis of the Old Order

George F. Kennan

Honored for : Russia Leaves the War

Arthur S. Link

Honored for : Wilson

James G. Randall

Honored for : Lincoln, the President

Elizabeth Stevenson

Honored for : Henry Adams

Richard N. Current

Honored for : Lincoln, the President

Paul Horgan

Honored for : Great River

Leonard D. White

Honored for : The Jacksonians

Clinton Rossiter

Honored for : Seedtime of the Republic

William L. Langer

Honored for : The Undeclared War, 1940-1941

Eric F. Goldman

Honored for : Rendezvous with Destiny

George Dangerfield

Honored for : The Era of Good Feelings

Merlo J. Pusey

Honored for : Charles Evans Hughes

C. Vann Woodward

Honored for : Origins of the New South, 1877-1913

Henry Nash Smith

Honored for : Virgin Land

Arthur N. Holcombe

Honored for : Our More Perfect Union

Herbert Eugene Bolton

Honored for : Coronado

Lawrence H. Gipson

Honored for : The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Year, 1758\u20131760

Samuel Eliot Morison

Honored for : The Rising Sun in the Pacific 1931 - April 1942

Robert E. Sherwood

Honored for : Roosevelt and Hopkins

Bernard DeVoto

Honored for : Across the Wide Missouri

Allan Nevins

Honored for : Ordeal of the Union