The Ralph Waldo Emerson Award is a non-fiction literary award given by the Phi Beta Kappa society, the oldest academic society of the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

, for books that have made the most significant contributions to the humanities. Albert William Levi won the first of these awards, in 1960.

Winners

*1960: Albert William Levi, ''Philosophy and the Modern World'' (Indiana University Press) *1961: W. T. Stace, ''Mysticism and Philosophy'' (J.B. Lippincott) *1962:

Herbert J. Muller Herbert J. Muller (1905–1980) was an American historian, academic, government official and writer. He received his education at Cornell University. He taught at Cornell, Purdue and Indiana University (1959-1980), served in the Department of Sta ...

, ''Freedom in the Ancient World'' (Harper & Brothers) *1963:

Richard Hofstadter Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historic ...

, '' Anti-intellectualism in American Life'' (Knopf) *1964: Thomas F. Gossett, ''Race: The History of An Idea in America'' (Southern Methodist University Press) *1965:

Howard Mumford Jones Howard Mumford Jones (April 16, 1892 – May 11, 1980) was an American intellectual historian, literary critic, journalist, poet, and professor of English at the University of Michigan and later at Harvard University. Jones was the book editor for ...

, '' O Strange New World: American Culture - The Formative Years'' (Viking Press) *1966: John Herman Randall, Jr., ''The Career of Philosophy: From the German Enlightenment to the Age of Darwin'' (Columbia University Press) *1967: Robert Coles, '' Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear'' (Atlantic-Little, Brown) *1968: Winthrop D. Jordan, ''White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812'' (University of North Carolina Press) *1969: Peter Gay, '' Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider'' (Harper & Row) *1970:

Rollo May Rollo Reece May (April 21, 1909 – October 22, 1994) was an American existential psychologist and author of the influential book '' Love and Will'' (1969). He is often associated with humanistic psychology and existentialist philosophy, ...

, '' Love and Will'' (Norton) *1971: Charles A. Barker, ''American Convictions: Cycles of Public Thought, 1600-1850'' (J.B. Lippincott) *1972:

John Rawls John Bordley Rawls (; February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in ...

, ''

A Theory of Justice ''A Theory of Justice'' is a 1971 work of political philosophy and ethics by the philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) in which the author attempts to provide a moral theory alternative to utilitarianism and that addresses the problem of distributi ...

'' (The Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press Harvard University Press (HUP) is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. After the retir ...

) *1973: Barrington Moore, Jr., ''Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them'' (Beacon Press) *1974: Frederic C. Lane, ''Venice: A Maritime Republic'' (Johns Hopkins University Press) *1975:

Marshall Hodgson Marshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson (April 11, 1922 – June 10, 1968), was an Islamic studies academic and a world historian at the University of Chicago. He was chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought in Chicago. Works Though he ...

, ''The Venture of Islam'' (University of Chicago Press) *1976:

Paul Fussell Paul Fussell Jr. (22 March 1924 – 23 May 2012) was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commenta ...

, '' The Great War and Modern Memory'' (Oxford University Press) *1977:

Eugen Weber Eugen Joseph Weber (April 24, 1925 – May 17, 2007) was a Romanian-born American historian with a special focus on Western world, Western civilization. Weber became a historian because of his interest in politics, an interest dating back to a ...

, ''Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914'' (Stanford University Press) *1978:

Bruce Kuklick Bruce Kuklick ( ; born March 3, 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American historian. He currently serves as the Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as ...

, ''The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930'' (Yale University Press) *1979:

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Elizabeth Lewisohn Eisenstein (October 11, 1923 – January 31, 2016) was an American historian of the French Revolution and early 19th-century France. She is well known for her work on the history of early printing, writing on the transition in ...

, ''The Printing Press As an Agent of Change'', Volumes I and II (Cambridge University Press) *1980:

Frank E. Manuel Frank Edward Manuel (12 September 1910 – 2003) was an American historian, Kenan Professor of History, emeritus, at New York University and Alfred and Viola Hart University Professor, emeritus, at Brandeis University. He was known for his work on ...

and Fritzie P. Manuel, ''Utopian Thought in the Western World'' (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) *1981: George M. Fredrickson, ''White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History'' (Oxford University Press) *1982: Robert Nozick, '' Philosophical Explanations'' (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) *1983: Daniel Joseph Singal, ''The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945'' (University of North Carolina Press) *1984: David G. Roskies, ''Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture'' (Harvard University Press) *1985: Joel Williamson, ''The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation'' (Oxford University Press) *1986:

Benjamin I. Schwartz Benjamin Isadore Schwartz (December 12, 1916 – November 14, 1999) was an American academic, political scientist, and sinologist who wrote on a wide range of topics in Chinese politics and intellectual history. He taught at Harvard his entire ...

, ''The World of Thought in Ancient China'' (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) *1987: Alfred W. Crosby, '' Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900'' (Cambridge University Press) *1988: David Montgomery, '' The Fall of the House of Labor'' (Cambridge University Press) *1989: Peter Brown, ''The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunication in Early Christianity'' (Columbia University Press) *1990: William L. Vance, ''America’s Rome, Volumes I and II'' (Yale University Press) *1991: Carl N. Degler, ''In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought'' (Oxford University Press) *1992:

Gordon S. Wood Gordon Stewart Wood (born November 27, 1933) is an American historian and professor at Brown University. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for '' The Radicalism of the American Revolution'' (1992). His book ''The Creation o ...

, ''The Radicalism of the American Revolution'' (Knopf) *1993:

Theda Skocpol Theda Skocpol (born May 4, 1947) is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is a highly influential figure in both sociology and pol ...

, ''Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States'' (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) *1994:

David Levering Lewis David Levering Lewis (born May 25, 1936) is an American historian, a Julius Silver University Professor, and a professor of history at New York University. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, for ...

, '' W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919'' (Henry Holt and Company) *1995:

Caroline Walker Bynum Caroline Walker Bynum, FBA (born May 10, 1941, in Atlanta, Georgia)Caroline Walker Bynum short CV
at < ...

, ''The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 220-1336'' (Columbia University Press) *1996:

Eloise Quiñones Keber Eloise Quiñones Keber is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she specializes in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Latin American art. She earned her Ph.D from Columbia University in 1984. Wri ...

, ''Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript'' (University of Texas Press) *1997: Steven B. Smith, ''Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity'' (Yale University Press) *1998:

Jill Lepore Jill Lepore is an American historian and journalist. She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at ''The New Yorker'', where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American ...

, ''The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity'' (Alfred A. Knopf) *1999: H.C. Erik Midelfort, ''A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany'' (Stanford University Press) *2000:

Peter Novick Peter Novick (July 26, 1934, Jersey City – February 17, 2012, Chicago) was an American historian who was Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He was best known for writing ''That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and t ...

, '' The Holocaust in American Life'' (Houghton Mifflin) *2001: Debora Silverman, ''Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art'' (Straus and Giroux) *2002: Fredric L. Cheyette, ''Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours'' (Cornell University Press) *2003:

David Freedberg David Freedberg is Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. He was also Director of the Warburg Institute at the University of London from July 2 ...

, ''The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History'' (University of Chicago Press) *2004: Jennifer Michael Hecht, '' The End of the Soul'' (Columbia University Press) *2005: Isabel V. Hull, ''Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany'' (Cornell University Press) *2006: Susan Scott Parrish, ''American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World'' (University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture) *2007:

David Brion Davis David Brion Davis (February 16, 1927 – April 14, 2019) was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, ...

, '' Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World'' (Oxford University Press) *2008:

Leor Halevi Lior ( he, ליאור) is a Jewish given name which means "my light" in Hebrew. Alternative spellings include Leeor, Leor, and Lyor. A female variant is Leora. Lior may refer to the following persons: * Lior, Israeli-born Australian singer-songwrit ...

, ''Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society'' (Columbia University Press) *2009: Peter Trachtenberg, ''The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning'' (Little, Brown and Company) *2010: Susan M. Reverby, ''Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy'' (University of North Carolina Press) *2011:

Timothy Snyder Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute ...

, '' Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin'' (Basic Books) *2012: Jay Rubenstein, ''Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse'' (Basic Books) *2013:

Timothy Egan Timothy P. Egan (born November 8, 1954) is an American author, journalist and op-ed columnist for ''The New York Times'', writing from a liberal perspective. Egan has written nine books. His first, ''The Good Rain'', won the Pacific Northwest ...

, ''Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis'' (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) *2014:

David Nirenberg David Nirenberg is a medievalist and intellectual historian. He is the Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He previously taught at the University of Chicago, where he was Dean of the Divinity Scho ...

, ''Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition'' (W.W. Norton) *2015: Joan Breton Connelly, ''The Parthenon Enigma: A New Understanding of the West’s Most Iconic Building and the People Who Made It'' (Knopf) *2016: E.M. Rose, ''The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe'' (Oxford University Press) *2017: Elizabeth Hinton, ''From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America'' (Harvard University Press) *2018:

Mike Wallace Myron Leon Wallace (May 9, 1918 – April 7, 2012) was an American journalist, game show host, actor, and media personality. He interviewed a wide range of prominent newsmakers during his seven-decade career. He was one of the original correspo ...

, ''Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919'' (Oxford University Press) *2019: Sarah E. Igo, ''The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America'' (Harvard University Press) *2020: Sarah Seo, ''Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom'' (Harvard University Press) *2021: Alice Baumgartner, ''South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War'' (Basic Books)

References

{{reflist

External links

The Phi Beta Kappa Society: Ralph Waldo Emerson Award — List of Previous WinnersRalph Waldo Emerson Award at lovethebook
American non-fiction literary awards Awards established in 1960 Humanities awards

Winners

See also

References

External links