Annal:1993 Pulitzer Prize for History
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1993. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Radicalism of the American Revolution
- 1993 Pulitzer–History winner
- Score: 10.43
Grand in scope, rigorous in its arguments, and elegantly synthesizing thirty years of scholarship, this splendid book is likely to become the definitive work on the social, political, and economic consequences of 1776.
In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood depicts not just a break with England, but the rejection of an entire way of life: of a society of feudal dependencies, a politics of patronage, and a world view in which people were divided between the nobility and “the Herd.” He shows how the theories of the country’s founders…
The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction
- 1993 Pulitzer–History finalist
- 1992 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 12.43
At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnic and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century—a combination of progress and reaction that defined the…
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America
- 1993 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 1992 NBCC–Criticism winner
- 1993 Pulitzer–History finalist
- 1992 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 32.43
The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead, he gave the whole nation “a new birth of freedom” in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training, and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece.
By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized…
