Merle Curti Award

The Merle Curti Award is awarded annually by the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American social and/or American intellectual history.[1][2][3] It is named in honor of Merle Curti (1897–1996). A committee of 5 members of the Organization of American Historians chooses the winners from published monographs submitted by the author(s). Committee members represent the entire spectrum of American history and serve a one-year term. Beginning with the awards of 2004, the Committee may select 1 book "winner" in American intellectual history, 1 book "winner" in American social history, and may list other "finalists" in each field. "Winners" split a $1000 cash award.[4] Although not explicitly stated, "American" refers to the "United States of America" alone.

Year Winner Title
1978 Henry F. May The Enlightenment in America (Oxford University Press)
1979 Garry Wills Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Doubleday)
1980 Paul E. Johnson A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (Hill and Wang)
Thomas Dublin Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (Columbia University Press)
1981 James T. Schleifer The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America (University of North Carolina Press)
1982 George M. Fredrickson White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (Oxford University Press)
1983 Norman Fiering Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press) and Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context (Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press)
1984 Dino Cinel From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Stanford University Press)
1985 Leo P. Ribuffo The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Temple University Press)
1986 Kerby A. Miller Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford University Press)
1987 James T. Kloppenberg Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford University Press)
1988 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James L. Leloudis, Robert R. Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones and Christopher B. Daly Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (University of North Carolina Press)
Marcus Rediker Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge University Press)
1989 Edmund S. Morgan Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (W.W. Norton)
1990 James H. Merrell The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press)
1991 David D. Hall Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Knopf)
John L. Brooke The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (Cambridge University Press)
1992 David R. Roediger The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso)
1993 Robert B. Westbrook John Dewey and American Democracy (Cornell University Press)
1994 W. Fitzhugh Brundage Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (University of Illinois Press)
1995 Wilfred M. McClay The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press)
1996 George Chauncey Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (Basic Books)
1997 Lance Banning The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Cornell University Press)
Ann Douglas Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
1998 Robert A. Orsi Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (Yale University Press)
1999 Rogers M. Smith Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (Yale University Press)
2000 Woody Holton Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/The University of North Carolina Press)
2001 Kimberly K. Smith The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics (University Press of Kansas)
2002 David W. Blight Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
2003 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (Knopf)
2004 Colin G. Calloway One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (University of Nebraska Press)
George M. Marsden Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press)
Steven Hahn A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
2005 Steven Mintz Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
Michael O'Brien Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (University of North Carolina Press)
2006 Elizabeth Borgwardt A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press)
2007 Scott Reynolds Nelson Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford University Press)
Moon-Ho Jung Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Johns Hopkins University Press)
2008 Marcus Rediker The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking)
2009 Vincent Brown The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press)
Pekka Hämäläinen The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press)
2010 Laura Dassow Walls The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press)
Seth Rockman Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University Press)
2011 Jefferson Cowie Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press)
Stephanie McCurry Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press)
2012 Susan J. Pearson The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press)
Cindy Hahamovitch No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton University Press)
2013 Angus Burgin The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Great Depression (Harvard University Press)
Brett Rushforth Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press)
2014 W. Caleb McDaniel The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Louisiana State University Press)
Alan Taylor The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (W.W. Norton)
2015 Kyle G. Volk Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford University Press)
Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (University of Pennsylvania Press)
2016 Daniel Immerwahr Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard University Press)
Julie M. Weise Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (University of North Carolina Press)
2017 Susanna L. Blumenthal Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard University Press)
Wendy Warren New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (Liveright/W.W. Norton)
2018 Brittney C. Cooper Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press)
Tiya Miles The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (The New Press)
2019 Sarah E. Igo The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press)
Amy Murrell Taylor Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (The University of North Carolina Press)
2020 Stephanie Jones-Rogers They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press)
Katrina Forrester In the Shadows of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press)
2021 Garrett Felber Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (University of North Carolina Press)
Johanna Fernández The Young Lords: A Radical History (University of North Carolina Press)
2022 Emily Klancher Merchant Building the Population Bomb (Oxford University Press)
Samantha Seeley Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States (Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press)
2023 Kathryn Gin Lum Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press)
Laura F. Edwards Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth- Century United States (Oxford University Press)
  1. ^ "Merle Curti Award". The Organization of American Historians: Programs & Resources: OAH Awards and Prizes. The Organization of American Historians. Retrieved 2013-11-03.
  2. ^ "OAH Merle Curti Award | Book awards | LibraryThing".
  3. ^ "Merle Curti Award Winners". Archived from the original on 2009-03-29. Retrieved 2009-12-28.
  4. ^ "Award and Prize Committees". www.oah.org. Archived from the original on 2010-11-06.