The Mark Lynton History Prize is an annual $10,000 award given to a book "of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression". [1] The prize is one of three awards given as part of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism [2] and by the Columbia University School of Journalism. [3]
The prize is named in honor of Mark Lynton, a refugee from Nazi Germany, Second World War officer, and automobile industry executive. In 1939 Lynton was a Jewish German-born student studying history at Cambridge when he and other German nationals were rounded up and interned in detention camps in England and Canada as enemy aliens, suspected of being Nazi sympathizers. When Lynton was released, he joined the British Army, became a tank commander, and was later promoted to Major in the occupying force, Army of the Rhine, where he helped interrogate high-ranking Nazi officers. Lynton memorialized his odyssey in his memoir, Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee's Memoir of World War II. [4] The prize was established by his wife, Marion, children, Lili and Michael, and grandchildren, Lucinda, Eloise Lynton and Maisie Lynton, to honor Lynton who was an avid reader of history. The Lynton family has underwritten the Lukas Prize Project since its inception in 1998.
Year | Author | Title | Result | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
1999 | Adam Hochschild | King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa | Winner | |
2000 | John W. Dower | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | Winner | |
2001 | Fred Anderson | Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 | Winner | |
2002 | Mark Roseman | A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany | Winner | |
2003 | Robert W. Harms | The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of Slave Trade | Winner | |
2004 | Rebecca Solnit | River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West | Winner | |
2005 | Richard Steven Street | Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769–1913 | Winner | |
2006 | Megan Marshall | The Peabody Sisters: Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism | Winner | |
2007 | James T. Campbell | Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 | Winner | |
2008 | Peter Silver | Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America | Winner | |
2009 | Timothy Brook | Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World | Winner | |
2010 | James Davidson | The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World | Winner | |
2011 | Isabel Wilkerson | The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration | Winner | |
2012 | Sophia Rosenfeld | Common Sense: A Political History | Winner | |
2013 | Robert Caro | The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson | Winner | |
2014 | Jill Lepore | Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin | Winner | |
2015 | Harold Holzer | Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion | Winner | |
2016 | Nikolaus Wachsmann | KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps | Winner | |
2017 | Tyler Anbinder | City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York | Winner | |
2018 | Stephen Kotkin | Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 | Winner | |
2019 | Jeffrey C. Stewart | The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke | Winner | |
2019 | Andrew Delbanco | The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War | Winner | |
2020 | Kerri K. Greenidge | Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter | Winner | |
2021 | William G. Thomas III | A Question Of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War | Winner | |
2022 | Jane Rogoyska | Surviving Katyń: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth | Winner | [5] |
Katie Booth | The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness | Finalist | ||
2023 | Deborah Cohen | Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War | Winner | [6] |
Kelly Lytle Hernández | Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire & Revolution in the Borderlands | Finalist | ||
2024 | Ned Blackhawk | The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History | Winner | [7] |
Gary J. Bass | Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia | Finalist |
Jay Anthony Lukas was an American journalist and author, best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Common Ground is a classic study of race relations, class conflict, and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts, as seen through the eyes of three families: one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white, and one working-class African-American. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes.
John W. Dower is an American author and historian. His 1999 book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the Bancroft Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association.
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism is the primary journalism institution at Harvard University.
Rebecca Diane McWhorter is an American journalist, commentator, and author who has written extensively about race and the history of civil rights. She won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize in 2002 for Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.
Max Holland is an American journalist, author, and the editor of Washington Decoded, an internet newsletter on United States history that began publishing March 11, 2007. He is currently a contributing editor to The Nation and The Wilson Quarterly, and sits on the editorial advisory board of the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic, American Heritage, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, Studies in Intelligence, the Journal of Cold War Studies, Reviews in American History, and online at History News Network.
Eliza Griswold is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and poet. Griswold is currently a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a Times Critics’ Pick, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2019. Griswold was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a former Nieman Fellow and a current Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.
Tomas Alexander Asuncion Tizon was a Filipino-American author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His book Big Little Man, a memoir and cultural history, explores themes related to race, masculinity, and personal identity. Tizon taught at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. His final story, titled "My Family's Slave", was published as the cover story of the June 2017 issue of The Atlantic after his death, sparking significant debate.
Mark Roseman (born c. 1958) is an English historian of modern Europe with particular interest in The Holocaust. He received his B.A. at Christ's College, Cambridge and his PhD at the University of Warwick. As of 2007 he holds the Pat M. Glazer Chair of Jewish Studies at Indiana University (Bloomington).
The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize is an annual $10,000 award given to a book that exemplifies, "literary grace, a commitment to serious research and social concern." The prize is given by the Nieman Foundation and by the Columbia University School of Journalism.
James T. Campbell is an American historian. He is a professor of history at Stanford University.
Peter Silver is an early American historian.
Suzannah Terry Lessard is an American writer of literary non-fiction. She has written memoir, reportorial pieces, essays, and opinion.
Andrew H. Delbanco is an American writer and professor. He is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and the president of the Teagle Foundation.
Yochi J. Dreazen is an American journalist whose area of expertise is military affairs and national security. As of 2016, he is the deputy managing editor and foreign editor of Vox and the author of a book, The Invisible Front: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War, which details the story of one Army family's fight against military suicide. In the past he has been a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and National Journal and managing editor for news at Foreign Policy.
Jonathan Myerson Katz is an American journalist and author known for his reporting on the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the role of the United Nations in the ensuing cholera outbreak.
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West is a 2003 book by American writer Rebecca Solnit, published by Viking; in the United Kingdom it was published by Bloomsbury as Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge. The book is a biographical portrait of photographer and inventor Eadweard Muybridge, a history of the development of technological change in the West during the later half of the nineteenth century that led to development of the modern film industry in Hollywood and later the information technology industry in Silicon Valley, and an essay focusing on a series of connections between Muybridge's life and the changing human landscape of the American West.
Nikolaus Daniel Wachsmann is a professor of modern European history in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Edward Alden is an American journalist, author, and the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Alden specializes in U.S. economic competitiveness, U.S. trade policy, and visa and immigration policy. Alden is the author of The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11, a finalist for the Lukas Book Prize, and Failure to Adjust: How Americans Got Left Behind in the Global Economy.
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps is a 2015 book by Birkbeck College professor Nikolaus Wachsmann.
The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, established in 1999, is a literary award "given annually to aid in the completion of a significant work of nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern." The prize is given by the Nieman Foundation and by the Columbia University School of Journalism and is intended to "assist in closing the gap between the time and money an author has and the time and money that finishing a book requires.