Eligibility[edit]
The Parkman Prize is offered annually to a non-fiction book, including biography, that is distinguished by its literary merit and makes an important contribution to the history of what is now the United States. The author need not be a citizen or resident of the United States, and the book need not be published in the United States. Textbooks, edited collections, bibliographies, reference works, and juvenile books are ineligible. The book's copyright must be in the previous year.
The prize[edit]
In 2013 the prize consisted of a certificate and $2,000. A certificate is also presented to the publisher. The prize is awarded at the society's annual meeting in May.
1958 – for The Crisis of the Old Order
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
1959 – for Henry Adams: The Middle Years
Ernest Samuels
1960 – for Edison: A Biography
Matthew Josephson
1961 – for Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson
Elting E. Morison
1962 – for Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century's Turn
Leon Wolff
1963 – for That Wilder Image: The Painting of America's Native School from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer
James Thomas Flexner
1964 – for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal
William Leuchtenburg
1965 – for Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment
Willie Lee Nichols Rose
1966 – for The Americans: The National Experience
Daniel J. Boorstin
1967 – for Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West
William H. Goetzmann
1969 – for White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
Winthrop Jordan
1970 – for The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941
Theodore A. Wilson
1972 – for Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship, based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers
Joseph P. Lash
1973 – for FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882-1928
Kenneth S. Davis
1974 – for Stephen A. Douglas
Robert W. Johannsen
1976 – for American Slavery, American Freedom
Edmund S. Morgan
1977 – for World of Our Fathers
Irving Howe
1979 – for The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire
R. David Edmunds
1980 – for Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
Leon F. Litwack
1981 – for A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783
Charles Royster
1982 – for Grant: A Biography
William S. McFeely
1983 – for Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845
John R. Stilgoe
1984 – for Changes in the Land, Revised Edition: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
William Cronon
1985 – for The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation
Joel Williamson
1987 – for A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture
Michael G. Kammen
1988 – for Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War
Eric Larrabee
1990 – for A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt
Geoffrey C. Ward
1991 – for A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century
Paul E. Hoffman
1992 – for The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815
Richard White
1995 – for The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
John Putnam Demos
1996 – for Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
1997 – for Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
Drew Gilpin Faust
1998 – for Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
John M. Barry
1999 – for The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado
Elliott West
2001 – for Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766
Fred Anderson
2003 – for Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
James F. Brooks
2004 – for A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial
Suzanne Lebsock
2005 – for Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930
Alan Trachtenberg
2006 – for The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism
Megan Marshall
2007 – for Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830
John H. Elliott
2008 – for FDR
Jean Edward Smith
2009 – for On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape
Jared Farmer
2010 – for Cheever: A Life
Blake Bailey
2011 – for Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
Jefferson Cowie
2012 – for Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
Richard White
2013 – for Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam[2]
Fredrik Logevall
2014 – for A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination[3]
Philip Shenon
2015 – for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality[4]
Danielle Allen
2016 – for American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam[4]
Christine Leigh Heyrman
2020 – for Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century[6]
Charles King
2022 – for Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America.[8]
Nicole Eustace
2023 – for The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America.[9]
John Wood Sweet
2024 – for The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence.[10]
David Waldstreicher
1994 -
Walter Lord
1988 -
Forrest Pogue
1974 -
Alfred A. Knopf
1970 -
Samuel Eliot Morison
1962 -