The Mark Lynton History Prize is an annual award in the amount of $10,000 given to a book "of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression".[1] The prize is one of three awards given as part of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism[2] and by the Columbia University School of Journalism.[3]
The prize is named in honor of Mark Lynton, a refugee from Nazi Germany, Second World War officer, and automobile industry executive. In 1939 Lynton was a Jewish German-born student, studying history at Cambridge when he and other German nationals were rounded up and interned in detention camps in England and Canada as enemy aliens, suspected of being Nazi sympathizers. When Lynton was released he joined the British Army, became a tank commander, and was later promoted to Major in the occupying force, Army of the Rhine, where he helped interrogate high-ranking Nazi officers. Lynton memorialized his odyssey in his memoir, Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee's Memoir of World War II.[4] The prize was established by his wife, Marion, children, Lili and Michael, and grandchildren, Lucinda, Eloise Lynton and Maisie Lynton, to honor Lynton who was an avid reader of history. The Lynton family has underwritten the Lukas Prize Project since its inception in 1998.
| Year | Author | Title | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa | Winner | ||
| 2000 | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | Winner | ||
| 2001 | Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 | Winner | ||
| 2002 | A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany | Winner | ||
| 2003 | The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of Slave Trade | Winner | ||
| 2004 | River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West | Winner | ||
| 2005 | Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769–1913 | Winner | ||
| 2006 | The Peabody Sisters: Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism | Winner | ||
| 2007 | Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 | Winner | ||
| 2008 | Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America | Winner | ||
| 2009 | Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World | Winner | ||
| 2010 | The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World | Winner | ||
| 2011 | The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration | Winner | ||
| 2012 | Winner | |||
| 2013 | Winner | |||
| 2014 | Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin | Winner | ||
| 2015 | Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion | Winner | ||
| 2016 | KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps | Winner | ||
| 2017 | City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York | Winner | ||
| 2018 | Winner | |||
| 2019 | Winner | |||
| 2019 | The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War | Winner | ||
| 2020 | Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter | Winner | ||
| 2021 | A Question Of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War | Winner | ||
| 2022 | Surviving Katyń: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth | Winner | [5] | |
| The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness | Finalist | |||
| 2023 | Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War | Winner | [6] | |
| Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire & Revolution in the Borderlands | Finalist | |||
| 2024 | The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History | Winner | [7] | |
| Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia | Finalist |