Ralph Waldo Emerson Award Winners

           

2023: Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War by Deborah Cohen (Random House)

2022: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (Random House) 
2021: South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War by Alice Baumgartner (Basic Books)
2020: Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom by Sarah Seo (Harvard University Press)
2019: The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America by Sarah E. Igo (Harvard University Press) 
2018: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 by Mike Wallace (Oxford University Press)
2017: From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America by Elizabeth Hinton (Harvard University Press)
2016: The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe by E.M. Rose (Oxford University Press) 
2015: The Parthenon Enigma by Joan Breton Connelly (Knopf) 
2014: Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg (W. W. Norton & Company) 
2013: Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis  by Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
2012: Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse by Jay Rubenstein ​(Basic Books)
2011: Bloodlands:Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder ​(Basic Books)
2010: Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy by Susan M. Reverby ​(University of North Carolina Press)
2009:The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning by Peter Trachtenberg ​(Little, Brown and Company)
2008: Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society by Leor Halevi (Columbia University Press)
2007: Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World  by David Brion Davis (Oxford University Press)
2006: American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British and Atlantic World  by Susan Scott Parrish (University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture) 
2005: Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany by Isabel Hull (Cornell University Press)
2004:The End of the Soul  by Jennifer Michael Hecht (Columbia University Press)
2003:The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History  by David Freedberg (University of Chicago Press)
2002: Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours  by Fredric L. Cheyette (Cornell University Press)
2001:Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art  by Debora Silverman (Houghton Mifflin)
2000:The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick (Straus and Giroux)
1999: A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany  by H.C. Erik Midelfort (Stanford University Press)
1998: The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity byJill Lepore (Alfred A. Knopf)
1997: Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity by Steven B. Smith (Yale University Press)
1996: Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript  by Eloise Quinones Keber (University of Texas Press)
1995: The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 220-1336  by Caroline Walker Bynum (Columbia University Press)
1994: W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919  by David Levering Lewis (Henry Holt and Company)
1993: Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States by Theda Skocpol (The Belknap Press)
1992: The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood (Knopf)
1991:  In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought  by Carl N. Degler (Oxford University Press)
1990: America’s Rome, Volumes I and II   by William L. Vance (Yale University Press)
1989: The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunication in Early Christianity  by Peter Brown (Columbia University Press)
1988: The Fall of the House of Labor by David Montgomery (Cambridge University Press)
1987: Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900  by Alfred W. Crosby (Cambridge University Press)
1986: The World of Thought in Ancient China by Benjamin I. Schwartz T(he Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
1985: The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation  by Joel Williamson (Oxford University Press)
1984: Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture by David G. Roskies (Harvard University Press)
1983: The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945  by Daniel Joseph Singal (University of North Carolina Press)
1982: Philosophical Explanations by Robert Nozick (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
1981: White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History  by George M. Fredrickson (Oxford University Press)
1980: Utopian Thought in the Western World  by Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
1979: The Printing Press As An Agent of Change, Volumes I and II  by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Cambridge University Press)
1978: The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930  by Bruce Kuklick (Yale University Press)
1977: Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 by Eugen Weber (Stanford University Press)
1976: The Great War and Modern Memory  by Paul Fussell (Oxford University Press)
1975: The Venture of Islam by Marshall G. S. Hodgsonr (University of Chicago Press)
1974: Venice: A Maritime Republic by Frederic C. Lane (Johns Hopkins University Press)
1973: Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them  by Barrington Moore, Jr. (Beacon Press)
1972: A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (The Belknap Press of Harvard University)
1971: American Convictions: Cycles of Public Thought, 1600-1850 by Charles A. Barker (J.B. Lippincott)
1970: Love and Will  by Rollo May (Norton)
1969: Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider by Peter Gay (Harper & Row)
1968: White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 by Winthrop D. Jordan (University of North Carolina Press)
1967: Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear  by Robert Coles (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
1966: The Career of Philosophy: From the German Enlightenment to the Age of Darwin  by John Herman Randall (Columbia University Press)
1965:  O Strange New World: American Culture-The Formative Years  by Howard Mumford Jones (Viking Press)
1964:  Race: The History of An Idea in America  by Thomas F. Gossett (Southern Methodist University Press)
1963:  Anti-Intellectualism in American Life  by Richard Hofstadter (Knopf)
1962:  Freedom in the Ancient World   by Herbert J. Muller (Harper & Brothers)
1961:  Mysticism and Philosophy   by W. T. Stace (J.B. Lippincott)
1960: Philosophy and the Modern World   by Albert William Levi (Indiana University Press)