George Washington Prize

2024: David Waldstreicher

Historian David Waldstreicher offers the fullest account to date of Wheatley’s life and works, correcting myths, reconstructing intimate friendships, and deepening our understanding of her verse and the revolutionary era. 

2023: Maurizio Valsania

In First Among Men, author Maurizio Valsania introduces readers to a refreshingly human portrait of George Washington through an analysis of his masculinity, to include its physical, emotional, and social dimensions.

2022: Bruce A. Ragsdale

In Washington At the Plow, Bruce Ragsdale persuasively connects the two ideas of George Washington as farmer and George Washington as slave owner. Through his examination, Ragsdale gives us a new look at Washington’s evolving relationship with slavery.

2021: Mary Beth Norton

In 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, Mary Beth Norton richly described a key year in the revolutionary transformation of American resistance to Britain. She notes how the courts, the newspapers, the militia, and the assemblies were radicalized against the British.

2020: Rick Atkinson

In The British are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, Rick Atkinson recounts the first twenty-one months of America’s violent war for independence.

2019: Colin Calloway

Colin Calloway's book The Indian World of George Washington reveals the relationship between Washington and the Native leaders he dealt with intimately across the decades: Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Guyasuta, Attakullakulla, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Cornplanter, Red Jacket, and Little Turtle, among many others. 

2018: Kevin J. Hayes

Despite being a lifelong reader, Washington felt an acute sense of embarrassment about his relative lack of formal education and cultural sophistication. In Kevin J. Hayes' book, George Washington: A Life in Books, Hayes illustrates just how tirelessly Washington worked to improve.

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