Finalist: An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America , by Nick Bunker (Alfred A. Knopf )
A bifocal perspective on the countdown to the American Revolution, placing the war within a broader crisis of globalization.
Winners
Prize Winner in History in 2015:
Elizabeth A. Fenn
An engrossing, original narrative showing the Mandans, a Native American tribe in the Dakotas, as a people with a history.
History
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in History in 2015:
Sven Beckert
A work of staggering scholarship arguing that slavery was crucial to the dynamism of the industrial revolution.
The Jury
The Jury
Lawrence N. Powell(Chair )
professor emeritus
Mae Ngai
Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and professor of history; director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Anne F. Hyde
William R. Hochman Professor of History
Winners in History
Alan Taylor
A meticulous and insightful account of why runaway slaves in the colonial era were drawn to the British side as potential liberators.
Fredrik Logevall
A balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road toward full-blown war.
Manning Marable
An exploration of the legendary life and provocative views of one of the most significant African-Americans in U.S. history, a work that separates fact from fiction and blends the heroic and tragic.
Eric Foner
A well orchestrated examination of Lincoln's changing views of slavery, bringing unforeseeable twists and a fresh sense of improbability to a familiar story.
2015 Prize Winners
Anthony Doerr
An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Julia Wolfe
A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
David I. Kertzer
An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.