Annal:1996 Pulitzer Prize for History
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
- 1996 Pulitzer–History winner
- 1996 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 16.46
In this story of a frontier village in the early American Republic, Alan Taylor explores the lives of Judge William Cooper and the novelist James Fenimore Cooper—father and son. As frontier speculator, landlord, and politician, the father played a leading role in the conquest, resettlement, and environmental transformation of the early nation. Drawing upon his childhood memories of the New York frontier, the son created the historical fictions that made him the most popular, influential, and controversial American novelist of the early nineteenth…
The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic
- 1996 Pulitzer–History finalist
- Score: 6.46
James Madison was the finest democratic theorist that the United States has ever produced. His was the pivotal philosophical role in framing the Constitution and establishing the principles on which a wholly new form of government was to be based. Yet this widely informed and profoundly original thinker has been considered by most scholars to be an intellectual pragmatist who reacted variably and inconsistently to the changing circumstances of the Revolution and the Confederation.
Lance Banning’s powerful and persuasive reexamination of Madison’s thought at…
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
- 1996 Pulitzer–History finalist
- Score: 6.46
In this work of history, science and politics, Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, tells for the first time the secret story of how and why the hydrogen bomb was made; traces the path by which “the Bomb,” the supreme artifact of twentieth-century science and technology, became the defining issue of the Cold War; and reveals how close the world came to nuclear destruction before the United States and the former Soviet Union learned the lesson of nuclear stalemate—a stalemate, Rhodes makes clear, that forced…
