2008 Pulitzer Prizes

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. The history award went to Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, the latest entry in the Oxford History of the United States series. It is pretty clear that every time one of those books comes out it will be a strong contender for the Pulitzer, one of those awards any historian would love to have but about which most all of us are at least a little ambivalent.

The biography/autobiography prize went to Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson (W.W. Norton) and the general nonfiction prize, which as often as not serves as another history award, went to Saul Friedlander's The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Harper Collins).