Annal:1992 Pulitzer Prize for History

The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties

Mark E. Neely

• 1992 Pulitzer–History winner
• Score: 10.42

If Abraham Lincoln was known as the Great Emancipator, he was also the only president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Indeed, Lincoln’s record on the Constitution and individual rights has fueled a century of debate, from charges that Democrats were singled out for harrassment to Gore Vidal’s depiction of Lincoln as an “absolute dictator.” Now, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Fate of Liberty, one of America’s leading authorities on Lincoln wades straight into this controversy, showing just who was jailed and why, even as he explores the whole range of Lincoln’s constitutional policies.

Mark Neely depicts Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus as a well-intentioned attempt to deal with a floodtide of unforeseen events: the threat to Washington as Maryland flirted with secession, disintegrating public order in the border states, corruption among military contractors, the occupation of hostile Confederate territory, contraband trade with the South, and the outcry against the first draft in U.S. history. Drawing on letters from prisoners, records of military…

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

William Cronon

• 1992 Pulitzer–History finalist
• Score: 6.42

Cronon’s history of 19th-century Chicago is in fact the history of the widespread effects of a single city on millions of square miles of ecological, cultural, and economic frontier. Cronon combines archival accuracy, ecological evaluation, and a sweeping understanding of the impact of railroads, stockyards, catalog companies, and patterns of property on the design of development of the entire inland United States to this date. Although focused on Chicago and the U.S., the general lessons it teaches are of global significance, and a rich source of metaphors for…

A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs

Theodore Draper

• 1992 Pulitzer–History finalist
• Score: 6.42

 

Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century

John Frederick Martin

• 1992 Pulitzer–History finalist
• Score: 6.42

 

The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815

Richard White, Frederick Hoxie, Neal Salisbury

• 1992 Pulitzer–History finalist
• Score: 6.42

A mutually comprehensible world was established by Europeans and Indians in 1650 in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called the Pays d’en haut. This account reveals how a middle ground for sharing values thrived for 165 years.