Annal:2003 Pulitzer Prize for History
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943
- 2003 Pulitzer–History winner
- Score: 10.53
In the first volume of his monumental trilogy about the liberation of Europe in WW II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the riveting story of the war in North Africa
The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is a story of courage and enduring triumph, of calamity and miscalculation. In this first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers without a grasp of the great drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. That first year of the Allied war was a pivotal point in American history, the moment when the United States began to act like a great power.
Beginning with the daring amphibious invasion in November 1942, An Army at Dawn follows the American and British armies as they fight the French in Morocco and Algeria, and then take on the Germans and Italians in Tunisia. Battle by battle, an inexperienced and sometimes poorly led army gradually becomes a superb fighting force. Central to the tale are the extraordinary but fallible commanders who come to…
At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America
- 2003 Pulitzer–History finalist
- 2002 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 12.53
It is easy to shrink from our country’s brutal history of lynching. Lynching is called the last great skeleton in our nation’s closet: It terrorized all of black America, claimed thousands upon thousands of victims in the decades between the 1880s and the Second World War, and leaves invisible but deep scars to this day. The cost of pushing lynching into the shadows, however—misremembering it as isolated acts perpetrated by bigots on society’s fringes—is insupportably high: Until we understand how pervasive and socially accepted the practice was—and, more important, why this was so—it will haunt all efforts at racial reconciliation.
“I could not suppress the thought,” James Baldwin once recalled of seeing the red clay hills of Georgia on his first trip to the South, “that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees.” Throughout America, not just in the South, blacks accused of a crime—or merely of violating social or racial customs—were hunted by mobs, abducted from jails, and given summary “justice” in blatant…
Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America
- 2003 Pulitzer–History finalist
- Score: 6.53
A lively, scholarly, and often startling exploration of nineteenth-century American attitudes toward sexuality—what we felt, thought, wrote, and said about the human body; about love, lust, intercourse, masturbation, contraception, and abortion; about the power of sexual words and images.
Horowitz shows us a many-voiced America in which an earthy acceptance of desire and sexual expression collided with the prohibitions broadcast from the pulpit and the printed page by evangelical Christian elements. She describes the new sensibility of agitators like Victoria Woodhull placing sex at the center of life, visionaries like Robert Owen and Frances Wright espousing free love, faddists like Sylvester Graham obsessing about the dangers of masturbation, a country physician writing the first scientifically grounded book on contraception, the lively new commerce in erotica—including newspapers such as the Sunday Flash and, most famous, the National Police Gazette (which featured a legal way to write explicitly about sex). We see a rising opposition instigated by conservative New Yorkers who…
