Merle Curti Award
The Merle Curti Award is awarded annually by the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American social and/or American intellectual history. A committee of 5 members of the Organization of American Historians chooses the winners from published monographs submitted by the author. Committee members represent the entire spectrum of American history and serve a one-year term. Beginning with the awards of 2004, the Committee may select 1 book "winner" in American intellectual history, 1 book "winner" in American social history, and may list other "finalists" in each field. "Winners" split a $1000 cash award. Although not explicitly stated, "American" refers to the "United States of America" alone.
| Year | Winner | Title |
| 1978 | Henry F. May | The Enlightenment in America |
| 1979 | Garry Wills | Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence |
| 1980 | Paul E. Johnson | A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 |
| 1980 | Thomas Dublin | Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 |
| 1981 | James T. Schleifer | The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America |
| 1982 | George M. Fredrickson | White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History |
| 1983 | Norman Fiering | Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition and Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context |
| 1984 | Dino Cinel | From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience |
| 1985 | Leo P. Ribuffo | The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War |
| 1986 | Kerby A. Miller | Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America |
| 1987 | James T. Kloppenberg | Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 |
| 1988 | Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James L. Leloudis, Robert R. Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones and Christopher B. Daly | Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World |
| 1988 | Marcus Rediker | Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 |
| 1989 | Edmund S. Morgan | Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America |
| 1990 | James H. Merrell | The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal |
| 1991 | David D. Hall | Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England |
| 1991 | John L. Brooke | The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 |
| 1992 | David R. Roediger | The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class |
| 1993 | Robert B. Westbrook | John Dewey and American Democracy |
| 1994 | W. Fitzhugh Brundage | Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 |
| 1995 | Wilfred M. McClay | The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America |
| 1996 | George Chauncey | Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 |
| 1997 | Lance Banning | The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic |
| 1997 | Ann Douglas | Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s |
| 1998 | Robert A. Orsi | Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes |
| 1999 | Rogers M. Smith | Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History |
| 2000 | Woody Holton | Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia |
| 2001 | Kimberly K. Smith | The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics |
| 2002 | David W. Blight | Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory |
| 2003 | Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz | Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America |
| 2004 | Colin G. Calloway | One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark |
| 2004 | George M. Marsden | Jonathan Edwards: A Life |
| 2004 | Steven Hahn | |
| 2005 | Steven Mintz | |
| 2005 | Michael O'Brien | Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 |
| 2006 | Elizabeth Borgwardt | A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights |
| 2006 | Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht | The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century |
| 2007 | Scott Reynolds Nelson | Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend |
| 2007 | Moon-Ho Jung | Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation |
| 2008 | Marcus Rediker | The Slave Ship: A Human History |
| 2009 | Vincent Brown | The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery |
| 2009 | Pekka Hämäläinen | The Comanche Empire |
| 2010 | Laura Dassow Walls | The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America |
| 2010 | Seth Rockman | Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore |
| 2011 | Jefferson Cowie | Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class |
| 2011 | Stephanie McCurry | Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South |
| 2012 | Susan J. Pearson | The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America |
| 2012 | Cindy Hahamovitch | No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor |
| 2013 | Angus Burgin | The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Great Depression |
| 2013 | Brett Rushforth | Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France |
| 2014 | W. Caleb McDaniel | The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform |
| 2014 | Alan Taylor | The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 |
| 2015 | Kyle G. Volk | Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy |
| 2015 | Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger | Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston |
| 2016 | Daniel Immerwahr | Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development |
| 2016 | Julie M. Weise | Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 |
| 2017 | Susanna L. Blumenthal | Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture |
| 2017 | Wendy Warren | New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America |
| 2018 | Brittney C. Cooper | Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women |
| 2018 | Tiya Miles | The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits |
| 2019 | Sarah E. Igo | The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America |
| 2019 | Amy Murrell Taylor | Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps |
| 2020 | Stephanie Jones-Rogers | They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South |