| Year | Book | Author |
| 2006 | Imperial Reckoning | Caroline Elkins |
| 2005 | Ghost Wars | Steve Coll |
| 2004 | Gulag: A History | Anne Applebaum |
| 2003 | America and the Age of Genocide | Samantha Power |
| 2002 | Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the climactic battle of the Civil Rights Revolution | Diane McWhorter |
| 2001 | Hirohito and the making of modern Japan | Herbert P Bix |
| 2000 | Embracing defeat: Japan in the wake of World War II | John W Dower |
| 1999 | Annals of the former world | John McPhee |
| 1998 | Guns, germs, and steel: The Fates of human societies | Jared Diamond |
| 1997 | Ashes to ashes: America's hundred-year cigarette war, the public health, and the unabashed triumph of Philip Morris | Richard Kluger |
| 1996 | The Haunted land: facing Europe's ghosts After communism | Tina Rosenberg |
| 1995 | The Beak of the finch: a story of evolution in our time | Jonathan Weiner |
| 1994 | Lenin's Tomb: the last days of the Soviet Empire | D. Remnic |
| 1993 | Lincoln at Gettysburg: the words that remade America | Gary Wills |
| 1992 | The Prize: The Epic quest for oil, money & power | Daniel Yergin |
| 1991 | The Ants | Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson |
