Annal:2005 Pulitzer Prize for History
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2005 Pulitzer–History winner
- 2004 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 16.55
Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia. George Washington lost ninety percent of his army and was driven across the Delaware River. Panic and despair spread through the states.
Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, Washington—and many other Americans—refused to let the Revolution die. Even as the British and Germans spread their troops across New Jersey,…
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
- 2004 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- 2005 Pulitzer–History finalist
- 2004 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 22.54
In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed…
Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860
- 2005 Pulitzer–History finalist
- Score: 6.55
In this magisterial history of intellectual life, Michael O’Brien analyzes the lives and works of antebellum Southern thinkers and reintegrates the South into the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history.
O’Brien finds that the evolution of Southern intellectual life paralleled and modified developments across the Atlantic by moving from a late Enlightenment sensibility to Romanticism and, lastly, to an early form of realism. Volume 1 describes the social underpinnings of the Southern intellect by examining patterns of travel and…
