2008 Mark Lynton History Prize Winner

Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America

"We tend to take so much pride in what we call American values—pluralism, tolerance, the spirit of democratic equality—that we rarely stop to ask how, historically, we came to hold them," noted the judges. "Peter Silver's brilliant analysis of frontier violence in the era of the Seven Years' War and the Revolution disturbingly suggests that they depended first of all on the creation of a terrifying enemy. In compulsively readable, quicksilver prose, he shows how ethnically and religiously fragmented settler groups who in times of peace shared little beyond mutual dislike and distrust found common ground in their fear of Indians and came to think of themselves less as English or Scots or Germans than as white people—and Americans—under the pressure of war."

Finalists:
Ramachandra Guha
for India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
Saul Friedländer
for The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945

2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award Winner

The Means of Reproduction (to be published by The Penguin Press in 2009)

“Michelle Goldberg looks at literally the entire world through the prism of women's issues and women's rights. From abortion to female circumcision, from sexual trafficking to abstinence-only programs, from Poland to Ethiopia to Nicaragua, she examines the conflict between self-determination and patriarchal tradition. And, in case after case, she contends, a conservative American administration, theologically and pragmatically bound to fundamentalist Christianity, plays either a direct or indirect role. In the tradition of Tony Lukas, Michelle Goldberg explores vast issues through individual lives.”

Finalists:
Lyanda Lynn Haupt for Crow Planet
Cecilia Ballí for untitled on the Juárez Murders