| 2025 | One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This ★ | Omar El Akkad ★ |
| 2024 | Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling ★ | Jason De León ★ |
| 2023 | The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History ★ | Ned Blackhawk ★ |
| 2022 | South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon To Understand the Soul of a Nation ★ | Imani Perry ★ |
| 2021 | All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake ★ | Tiya Miles ★ |
| 2020 | The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X ★ | Les Payne ★ |
| 2019 | The Yellow House ★ | Sarah M. Broom ★ |
| 2018 | The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke ★ | Jeffrey C. Stewart ★ |
| 2017 | The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia ★ | Masha Gessen ★ |
| 2016 | Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America ★ | Ibram X. Kendi ★ |
| 2015 | Between the World and Me ★ | Ta-Nehisi Coates ★☆ |
| 2014 | Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China ★ | Evan Osnos ★ |
| 2013 | The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America ★ | George Packer ★ |
| 2012 | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity ★ | Katherine Boo ★ |
| 2011 | The Swerve: How the World Became Modern ★ | Stephen Greenblatt ★☆ |
| 2010 | Just Kids ★ | Patti Smith ★ |
| 2009 | The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt ★ | T. J. Stiles ★ |
| 2008 | The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family ★ | Annette Gordon-Reed ★ |
| 2007 | Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA ★ | Tim Weiner ★ |
| 2006 | The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl ★ | Timothy Egan ★ |
| 2005 | The Year of Magical Thinking ★ | Joan Didion ★☆ |
| 2004 | Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age ★ | Kevin Boyle ★ |
| 2003 | Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy ★ | Carlos Eire ★ |
| 2002 | Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson ★ | Robert Caro ★☆ |
| 2001 | The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression ★ | Andrew Solomon ★ |
| 2000 | In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex ★ | Nathaniel Philbrick ★ |
| 1999 | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II ★ | John W. Dower ★☆☆ |
| 1998 | Slaves in the Family ★ | Edward Ball ★ |
| 1997 | American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson ★ | Joseph J. Ellis ★ |
| 1996 | An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us ★ | James P. Carroll ★ |
| 1995 | The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism ★ | Tina Rosenberg ★ |
| 1994 | How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter ★ | Sherwin B. Nuland ★ |
| 1993 | United States: Essays 1952–1992 ★ | Gore Vidal ★☆☆ |
| 1992 | Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story ★ | Paul Monette ★ |
| 1991 | Freedom, Vol. 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture ★ | Orlando Patterson ★ |
| 1990 | The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance ★ | Ron Chernow ★ |
| 1989 | From Beirut to Jerusalem ★ | Thomas L. Friedman ★ |
| 1988 | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam ★ | Neil Sheehan ★ |
| 1987 | The Making of the Atomic Bomb ★ | Richard Rhodes ★ |
| 1986 | Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape ★ | Barry Lopez ★☆ |
| 1985 | Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families ★ | J. Anthony Lukas ★ |
| 1984 | Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845 ★ | Robert V. Remini ★ |
| 1983 | Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller ★ | Judith Thurman ★☆ |
| 1983 | China: Alive in the Bitter Sea ★ | Fox Butterfield ★ |
| 1983 | Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times ★☆ | James R. Mellow ★☆☆ |
| 1983 | Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression ★ | Alan Brinkley ★ |
| 1983 | National Defense ★☆ | James Fallows ★☆ |
| 1983 | Utopian Thought in the Western World ★☆ | Frank E. Manuel ★☆☆ |
| 1982 | The Soul of a New Machine ★ | Tracy Kidder ★ |
| 1982 | Walter Lippmann and the American Century ★ | Ronald Steel ★ |
| 1982 | The Generation of 1914 ★ | Robert Wohl ★ |
| 1982 | People of the Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies, 1830–1879 ★ | Peter J. Powell ★ |
| 1982 | Mornings on Horseback ★ | David McCullough ★★☆ |
| 1982 | Naming Names ★☆ | Victor S. Navasky ★☆ |
| 1981 | Walt Whitman: A Life ★ | Justin Kaplan ★★ |
| 1981 | Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery ★ | Leon F. Litwack ★ |
| 1981 | Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality ★ | John Boswell ★ |
| 1981 | The Last Cowboy: Europeans and The Politics of Memory ★ | Jane Kramer ★ |
| 1981 | China Men ★ | Maxine Hong Kingston ★☆☆ |
| 1981 | Samuel Beckett: A Biography ★ | Deirdre Bair ★ |
| 1980 | The White House Years ★ | Henry A. Kissinger ★ |
| 1980 | A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century ★ | Barbara W. Tuchman ★ |
| 1980 | And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History 1918–1978 ★ | Malcolm Cowley ★☆☆ |
| 1980 | The Gnostic Gospels ★ | Elaine Pagels ★ |
| 1980 | A Severe Mercy ★ | Sheldon Vanauken ★ |
| 1980 | Max Perkins: Editor of Genius ★ | A. Scott Berg ★ |
| 1980 | The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt ★ | Edmund Morris ★ |
| 1980 | Congressional Quarterly's Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court ★ | Elder Witt ★ |
| 1980 | The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946–present ★ | Tim Brooks ★ |
| 1980 | Lauren Bacall by Myself ★ | Lauren Bacall ★☆☆ |
| 1980 | The Snow Leopard ★★ | Peter Matthiessen ★★★☆☆☆☆ |
| 1980 | The Right Stuff ★ | Tom Wolfe ★☆ |
| 1980 | The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations ★ | Christopher Lasch ★ |
| 1980 | Julia Child and More Company ★ | Julia Child ★ |
| 1979 | The Snow Leopard ★★ | Peter Matthiessen ★★★☆☆☆☆ |
| 1979 | Robert Kennedy and His Times ★ | Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ★ |
| 1979 | Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585–1763 ★ | Richard Beale Davis ★ |
| 1978 | The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870–1914 ★ | David McCullough ★★☆ |
| 1978 | Winners and Losers ★ | Gloria Emerson ★ |
| 1978 | Samuel Johnson ★ | Walter Jackson Bate ★☆ |
| 1977 | Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist ★ | W. A. Swanberg ★ |
| 1977 | The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales ★ | Bruno Bettelheim ★ |
| 1977 | World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made ★ | Irving Howe ★ |
| 1976 | The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 ★ | David Brion Davis ★☆ |
| 1976 | The Great War and Modern Memory ★ | Paul Fussell ★☆ |
| 1976 | Passage to Ararat ★ | Michael J. Arlen ★ |
| 1975 | The Life of Emily Dickinson ★ | Richard B. Sewall ★ |
| 1975 | All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw ★ | Theodore Rosengarten ★☆ |
| 1975 | The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson ★ | Bernard Bailyn ★ |
| 1975 | Interpretation of Schizophrenia ★ | Silvano Arieti ★☆ |
| 1975 | Marcel Proust ★ | Roger Shattuck ★ |
| 1975 | The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher ★ | Lewis Thomas ★ |
| 1975 | Anarchy, State, and Utopia ★ | Robert Nozick ★ |
| 1974 | The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York versus Lumumba Shakur, et al. ★ | Murray Kempton ★ |
| 1974 | [d] ★ | John Leonard Clive ★ |
| 1974 | Life: The Unfinished Experiment ★ | S. E. Luria ★ |
| 1974 | Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks ★ | Maurice Natanson ★ |
| 1974 | Deeper into Movies ★ | Pauline Kael ★ |
| 1973 | Diderot ★ | Arthur M. Wilson ★ |
| 1973 | The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations ★ | George B. Schaller ★ |
| 1973 | A Religious History of the American People ★ | S. E. Ahlstrom ★ |
| 1973 | Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation ★ | Isaiah Trunk ★ |
| 1973 | The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War ★ | Robert Manson Myers ★ |
| 1973 | George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, 1793–1799 ★ | James Thomas Flexner ★ |
| 1972 | The Last Whole Earth Catalogue ★ | Stewart Brand ★ |
| 1972 | The Blue Whale ★ | George L. Small ★ |
| 1972 | The Organized War, 1863–1864 ★ | Allan Nevins ★ |
| 1972 | The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven ★ | Charles Rosen ★ |
| 1972 | Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America ★ | Martin E. Marty ★ |
| 1972 | Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers ★ | Joseph P. Lash ★☆☆ |
| 1971 | Cocteau: A Biography ★ | Francis Steegmuller ★☆☆☆ |
| 1971 | Science in the British Colonies of America ★ | Raymond Phineas Stearns ★ |
| 1971 | Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom ★ | James MacGregor Burns ★ |
| 1970 | Huey Long ★ | T. Harry William ★ |
| 1970 | Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence ★ | Erik Erikson ★ |
| 1970 | An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir ★ | Lillian Hellman ★☆☆☆ |
| 1969 | White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 ★ | Winthrop Jordan ★ |
| 1969 | Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima ★ | Robert Jay Lifton ★☆ |
| 1969 | The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History ★ | Norman Mailer ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
| 1968 | Memoirs: 1925–1950 ★ | George F. Kennan ★★☆☆☆ |
| 1968 | Death at an Early Age ★ | Jonathan Kozol ★ |
| 1968 | Selected Essays ★ | William Troy ★ |
| 1967 | La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York ★ | Oscar Lewis ★☆ |
| 1967 | The Enlightenment, Vol. I: The Rise of Modern Paganism ★ | Peter Gay ★☆☆☆ |
| 1967 | Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography ★ | Justin Kaplan ★★ |
| 1966 | Paris Journal, 1944–1965 ★ | Janet Flanner ★ |
| 1966 | A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House ★ | Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. ★☆☆ |
| 1965 | God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion ★ | Norbert Wiener ★ |
| 1965 | The Oysters of Locmariaquer ★ | Eleanor Clark ★ |
| 1965 | The Life of Lenin ★ | Louis Fischer ★ |
| 1964 | John Keats: The Making of a Poet ★ | Aileen Ward ★ |
| 1964 | The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community ★ | William H. McNeill ★☆ |
| 1964 | Man-made America: Chaos or Control? ★ | Christopher Tunnard ★ |
| 1963 | Henry James ★ | Leon Edel ★☆☆☆ |
| 1962 | The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations and its Prospects ★ | Lewis Mumford ★☆☆☆ |
| 1961 | The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ★ | William L. Shirer ★ |
| 1960 | James Joyce ★ | Richard Ellmann ★☆ |
| 1959 | Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël ★ | J. Christopher Herold ★ |
| 1958 | The Lion and the Throne ★ | Catherine Drinker Bowen ★ |
| 1957 | Russia Leaves the War ★ | George F. Kennan ★★☆☆☆ |
| 1956 | An American in Italy ★ | Herbert Kubly ★ |
| 1955 | The Measure of Man ★ | Joseph Wood Krutch ★ |
| 1954 | A Stillness at Appomattox ★ | Bruce Catton ★ |
| 1953 | The Course of Empire ★ | Bernard De Voto ★ |
| 1952 | The Sea Around Us ★ | Rachel Carson ★ |
| 1951 | Herman Melville ★ | Newton Arvin ★ |
| 1950 | The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson ★ | Ralph L. Rusk ★ |
| 1940 | Who Walk Alone ★ | Perry Burgess ★ |
| 1940 | As I Remember Him: The Biography of R.S. ★ | Hans Zinsser ★ |
| 1939 | Wind, Sand and Stars ★ | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ★ |
| 1938 | With Malice Toward Some ★ | Margaret Halsey ★ |
| 1938 | Listen! The Wind ★ | Anne Morrow Lindbergh ★★ |
| 1938 | The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer ★ | David Fairchild ★ |
| 1937 | Madame Curie ★ | Ève Curie ★ |
| 1937 | Four Hundred Million Customers ★ | Carl Crow ★ |
| 1936 | The Flowering of New England: 1815–1865 ★ | Van Wyck Brooks ★ |
| 1936 | The Country Kitchen ★ | Della T. Lutes ★ |
| 1935 | North to the Orient ★ | Anne Morrow Lindbergh ★★ |