2020
Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
Lakota America (Yale University Press) is a complete account of the Lakota Indians from the early 16th to the early 21st Century, including the history of the iconic figures of Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull.
Pekka Hämäläinen is Rhodes Professor of American History at St. Catherine's College at the University of Oxford. He specializes in indigenous, colonial, imperial, environmental, and borderlands history in North America. Before Oxford, he taught at Texas A&M University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. His 2008 book, The Comanche Empire, received 12 book awards, including the 2008 Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and the Bancroft Prize.
2019
No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas
C.J. Janovy, an arts reporter and editor for public radio in Kansas City, MO, tells the compelling story of LGBT Kansans as they realized they would have to fight to create equality in their state. Using extensive interviews and research, she shares the diverse voices and experiences of LGBT community members living on the Plains and working for social change.
University Press of Kansas
2018
This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm
Genoways is a contributing editor at Mother Jones, The New Republic and Pacific Standard. His last book, "The Chain: Farm, Factory and the Fate of Our Food," was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award for Writing and Literature.
W.W. Norton & Company
2017
American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains
Dan Flores is a writer and historian who specializes in environmental and cultural history of the American West. Before his retirement, Flores held the A.B. Hammond Chair in Western History at the University of Montana
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
2016
Métis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People
Michel Hogue, Assistant Professor in History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario
Publisher: University of Regina Press in Canada and University of North Carolina Press in the U.S.
2015
Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People
Elizabeth Fenn, Professor of History, Unviersity of Colorado at Boulder
Publisher: Hill & Wang
2014
Architecture of Saskatchewan: A Visual Journey, 1930-2011
Bernard Flaman, conservation architect for Canada’s Public Works and Government Services
Publisher: University of Regina Press
2013
Blackfoot Redemption: A Blood Indian's Story of Murder, Confinement, and Imperfect Justice
William E. Farr, Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Montana, senior fellow and founding director of the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
2011
The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory
James N. Leiker, Associate Professor of History, Johnson County Community College; and Ramon Powers, Former Executive Director of the Kansas State Historical Society
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
2010
Hancock's War:
Conflict on the Southern Plains
William Y. Chalfant, Attorney, Hutchinson Kansas
Foreword by Jerome A. Greene
Publisher: Arthur H. Clark
2009
Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild
Michael Forsberg, Conservation Photographer, Lincoln, Nebraska
with Dan O'Brien, David Wishart, and Ted Kooser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
2008
The Comanche Empire
Pekka Hämäläinen, Associate Professor of History, University of California at Santa Barbara
Publisher: Yale University Press
2007
Ruling Pine Ridge
Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee
Akim D. Reinhardt, Associate Professor of History, Towson University, Towson, Maryland
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
2006
Indians and Emigrants:
Encounters on the Overland Trails
Michael L. Tate, Professor of History and Native American Studies, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
2005
Buffalo Bill's America:
William Cody and the Wild West Show
Louis S. Warren, W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History, University of California, Davis
Publisher: Knopf
Note: 2012 is missing because of a change in titling Book Prizes. After 2012, awards were named for the year the award was given. Before 2012, awards were named for the year the book was published.