| Year | Author(s) | Book | Award |
| 1962 | Theodore H. White | The Making of the President 1960 | Winner |
| 1963 | Barbara W. Tuchman | The Guns of August | Winner |
| 1964 | Richard Hofstadter | Anti-intellectualism in American Life | Winner |
| 1965 | Howard Mumford Jones | O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years | Winner |
| 1966 | Edwin Way Teale | Wandering Through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey Through the North American Winter | Winner |
| 1967 | David Brion Davis | The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture | Winner |
| 1968 | Will Durant and Ariel Durant | The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution | Winner |
| 1969 | René Jules Dubos | So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events | Winner |
| Norman Mailer | The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History | Winner |
| 1970 | Erik H. Erikson | Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence | Winner |
| 1971 | John Toland | The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 | Winner |
| 1972 | Barbara W. Tuchman | Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 | Winner |
| 1973 | Robert Coles | Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III | Winner |
| Frances FitzGerald | Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam | Winner |
| 1974 | Ernest Becker | The Denial of Death | Winner |
| 1975 | Annie Dillard | Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | Winner |
| 1976 | Robert N. Butler | Why Survive? Being Old in America | Winner |
| 1977 | William W. Warner | Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay | Winner |
| 1978 | Carl Sagan | The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence | Winner |
| 1979 | Edward O. Wilson | On Human Nature | Winner |
| 1980 | Douglas R. Hofstadter | Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid | Winner |
| Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar | The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination | Finalist |
| Lewis Thomas | The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher | Finalist |
| 1981 | Carl E. Schorske | Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture | Winner |
| Maxine Hong Kingston | China Men | Finalist |
| William Manchester | Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War | Finalist |
| Marshall Frady | Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey | Finalist |
| 1982 | Tracy Kidder | The Soul of a New Machine | Winner |
| John McPhee | Basin and Range | Finalist |
| Diana Trilling | Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor | Finalist |
| 1983 | Susan Sheehan | Is There No Place on Earth for Me? | Winner |
| Diane Johnson | Terrorists and Novelists | Finalist |
| Jonathan Schell | The Fate of the Earth | Finalist |
| 1984 | Paul Starr | The Social Transformation of American Medicine | Winner |
| Winston Groom and Duncan Spencer | Conversations with the Enemy | Finalist |
| Susan Jacoby | Wild Justice | Finalist |
| 1985 | Studs Terkel | The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two | Winner |
| Donald Keene | Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era | Finalist |
| Jonathan Kwitny | Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World | Finalist |
| 1986 | J. Anthony Lukas | Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families | Winner |
| Joseph Lelyveld | Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White | Winner |
| Robert N. Bellah | Habits and the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life | Finalist |
| 1987 | David K. Shipler | Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land | Winner |
| Cyra McFadden | Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir | Finalist |
| John McPhee | Rising from the Plains | Finalist |
| 1988 | Richard Rhodes | The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Winner |
| James Gleick | Chaos: Making a New Science | Finalist |
| Daniel Callahan | Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society | Finalist |
| 1989 | Neil Sheehan | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam | Winner |
| Timothy Ferris | Coming of Age in the Milky Way | Finalist |
| McGeorge Bundy | Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years | Finalist |
| Howard Kohn | The Last Farmer | Finalist |
| 1990 | Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson | And Their Children After Them | Winner |
| David Fromkin | A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 | Finalist |
| Stephen Jay Gould | Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History | Finalist |
| 1991 | Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson | The Ants | Winner |
| John McPhee | Looking for a Ship | Finalist |
| William duBuys and Alex Harris | River of Traps: A Village Life | Finalist |
| 1992 | Daniel Yergin | The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power | Winner |
| Andre Dubus | Broken Vessels | Finalist |
| Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall | Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics | Finalist |
| 1993 | Garry Wills | Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America | Winner |
| Susan Griffin | A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War | Finalist |
| Richard Rodriguez | Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father | Finalist |
| Anne Matthews | Where the Buffalo Roam: Restoring America's Great Plains | Finalist |
| 1994 | David Remnick | Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire | Winner |
| Peter Gay | The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud | Finalist |
| John Lukacs | The End of the Twentieth Century: And the End of the Modern Age | Finalist |
| 1995 | Jonathan Weiner | The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time | Winner |
| Sherwin B. Nuland | How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter | Finalist |
| John Berendt | Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story | Finalist |
| 1996 | Tina Rosenberg | The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism | Winner |
| Daniel C. Dennett | Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and The Meanings of Life | Finalist |
| Lawrence Weschler | Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology | Finalist |
| 1997 | Richard Kluger | Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris | Winner |
| Cynthia Ozick | Fame and Folly | Finalist |
| Samuel G. Freedman | The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond | Finalist |
| 1998 | Jared Diamond | Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | Winner |
| Steven Pinker | How the Mind Works | Finalist |
| Jon Krakauer | Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster | Finalist |
| 1999 | John McPhee | Annals of the Former World | Winner |
| Elliott Currie | Crime and Punishment in America | Finalist |
| Judith Rich Harris | The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do | Finalist |
| 2000 | John W. Dower | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | Winner |
| Scott Weidensaul | Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds | Finalist |
| Brian Greene | The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory | Finalist |
| 2001 | Herbert P. Bix | Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan | Winner |
| Dave Eggers | A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius | Finalist |
| Ted Conover | Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing | Finalist |
| 2002 | Diane McWhorter | Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution | Winner |
| Andrew Solomon | The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression | Finalist |
| David Halberstam | War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals | Finalist |
| 2003 | Samantha Power | "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide | Winner |
| Ellen Meloy | The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit | Finalist |
| Steven Pinker | The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature | Finalist |
| 2004 | Anne Applebaum | Gulag: A History | Winner |
| Steven Nadler | Rembrandt's Jews | Finalist |
| Dana Priest | The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military | Finalist |
| 2005 | Steve Coll | Ghost Wars | Winner |
| Suketu Mehta | Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found | Finalist |
| Luis Alberto Urrea | The Devil's Highway: A True Story | Finalist |
| 2006 | Caroline Elkins | Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya | Winner |
| Tony Judt | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Finalist |
| George Packer | The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq | Finalist |
| 2007 | Lawrence Wright | The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 | Winner |
| Pete Earley | Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness | Finalist |
| Thomas E. Ricks | Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq | Finalist |
| 2008 | Saul Friedländer | The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 | Winner |
| Allan Brandt | The Cigarette Century | Finalist |
| Alex Ross | The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | Finalist |
| 2009 | Douglas A. Blackmon | Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II | Winner |
| Arthur Herman | Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age | Finalist |
| William I. Hitchcock | The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe | Finalist |
| 2010 | David E. Hoffman | The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy | Winner |
| John Cassidy | How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities | Finalist |
| Robert Wright | The Evolution of God | Finalist |
| 2011 | Siddhartha Mukherjee | The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Winner |
| S.C. Gwynne | Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History | Finalist |
| Nicholas G. Carr | The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains | Finalist |
| 2012 | Stephen Greenblatt | The Swerve: How the World Became Modern | Winner |
| Diane Ackerman | One Hundred Names For Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing | Finalist |
| Mara Hvistendahl | Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men | Finalist |
| 2013 | Gilbert King | Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America | Winner |
| Katherine Boo | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Finalist |
| David George Haskell | The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature | Finalist |
| 2014 | Dan Fagin | Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation | Winner |
| Gary J. Bass | The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide | Finalist |
| Fred Kaplan | The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War | Finalist |
| 2015 | Elizabeth Kolbert | The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History | Winner |
| Evan Osnos | Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China | Finalist |
| Anand Gopal | No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes | Finalist |
| 2016 | Joby Warrick | Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS | Winner |
| Ta-Nehisi Coates | Between the World and Me | Finalist |
| Carla Power | If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran | Finalist |
| 2017 | Matthew Desmond | Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City | Winner |
| John Donvan and Caren Zucker | In a Different Key: The Story of Autism | Finalist |
| Micki McElya | The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery | Finalist |
| 2018 | James Forman Jr. | Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America | Winner |
| Suzy Hansen | Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-America World | Finalist |
| Richard O. Prum | The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us | Finalist |
| 2019 | Eliza Griswold | Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America | Winner |
| Bernice Yeung | In a Day's Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America's Most Vulnerable Workers | Finalist |
| Elizabeth Rush | Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore | Finalist |
| 2020 | Greg Grandin | The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America | Winner |
| Anne Boyer | The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care | Winner |
| Louise Aronson | Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life | Finalist |
| Albert Woodfox with Leslie George | Solitary | Finalist |
| 2021 | David Zucchino | Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy | Winner |
| Cathy Park Hong | Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning | Finalist |
| Sierra Crane Murdoch | Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country | Finalist |
| 2022 | Andrea Elliott | Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City | Winner |
| Carla Power | Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism | Finalist |
| Joshua Prager | The Family Roe: An American Story | Finalist |
| 2023 | Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa | His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice | Winner |
| Jing Tsu | Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern | Finalist |
| David George Haskell | Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction | Finalist |
| Linda Villarosa | Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation | Finalist |
| 2024 | Nathan Thrall | A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy | Winner |
| John Vaillant | Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World | Finalist |
| Siddharth Kara | Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives | Finalist |
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