Annal:2007 Pulitzer Prize for History
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2007. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
- 2007 Pulitzer–History winner
- Score: 10.57
This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it. It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an unprecedented account of one of the most volatile periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
- 2007 Pulitzer–History finalist
- 2006 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 12.57
From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.
With towering figures like William Bradford and the distinctly American hero Benjamin Church at the center of his narrative, Philbrick has fashioned a fresh and compelling portrait of the dawn of American history-a history dominated right from the start by issues of race, violence, and religion.
Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005
- 2007 Pulitzer–History finalist
- Score: 6.57
Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the “middle passage,” but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, Middle Passages offers a unique perspective on African Americans’ ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.
