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) |