Merle Curti Award Winners

2012
Intellectual History: Susan J. Pearson, Northwestern University, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (The University of Chicago Press)

Social History: Cindy Hahamovitch, College of William & Mary, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton University Press)

2011
Jefferson Cowie, Cornell University, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press)

Stephanie McCurry, University of Pennsylvania, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press)

2010
Laura Dassow Walls, University of South Carolina, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (The University of Chicago Press)

Seth Rockman, Brown University, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (The Johns Hopkins University Press)

Honorable Mention: Nathaniel Deutsch, The University of California, Santa Cruz, Inventing America's "Worst" Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael (University of California Press)

Honorable Mention: Martha A. Sandweiss, Princeton University, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin Press)

2009
Vincent Brown, Harvard University, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press)

Pekka Hämäläinen, University of California, Santa Barbara, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press)

2008
Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking)

2007
Scott Reynolds Nelson, College of William & Mary, Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford University Press)

Honorable Mention: Joan M. Jensen, New Mexico State University, Calling This Place Home: Women on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1850–1925 (Minnesota Historical Society Press)

Moon-Ho Jung, University of Washington, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (The Johns Hopkins University Press)

Honorable Mention: Howard Brick, Washington University in Saint Louis, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Cornell University Press)

2006
Intellectual History: Elizabeth Borgwardt, University of Utah, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)

Social History: Thomas Dublin, State University of New York at Binghamton, and Walter Licht, University of Pennsylvania, The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press)

2005
Intellectual History: Michael O’Brien, University of Cambridge, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (University of North Carolina Press)

Social History: Steven Mintz, University of Houston, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard University Press)

2004
Intellectual History: George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press)

Social History: Colin G. Calloway, Dartmouth College, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (University of Nebraska Press)

Social History: Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)

2003
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Smith College, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (Alfred A. Knopf)

2002
David W. Blight, Amherst College, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press)

[This book won both the Curti social and Curti intellectual awards for 2002.]

2001
Kimberly K. Smith, Carleton College, The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics (University Press of Kansas)

2000
Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture)

1999
Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (Yale University Press)

1998
Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (Yale University Press)

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, Giroux)

1996
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (Basic Books)

1995
Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (The University of North Carolina Press)

1994
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (University of Illinois Press)

1993
Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Cornell University Press)

1992
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (VERSO: The imprint of New Left Books)

1991
John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (Cambridge University Press

David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Alfred A. Knopf Inc.)

1990
James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors From European Contact Through the Era of Removal (The University of North Carolina Press and The Institute of Early American History and Culture)

1989
Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Soverignty in England and America (W.W. Norton & Company)

1988
Jacquelyn Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones and Christopher B. Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (The 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)

1987
James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford University Press)

1986
Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles (Oxford University Press)

1985
Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Temple University Press)

1984
Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Stanford University Press)

1983
Norman Fiering, Moral Philosphy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (The University of North Carolina Press); Jonathan Edward's Moral Thought and Its British Context (The University of North Carolina Press)

1982
George Frederickson, White Supremacy (Oxford University Press)

1981
James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America

1980
Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeepers 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)

1979
Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence

1977
Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford University Press)