And the award for best history writing goes to ...

At its annual dinner in New York on May 11, the Society of American Historians honored historical writing of exceptional literary merit.

The 8th annual Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Award for distinguished writing in American history of enduring public significance, given jointly with the Roosevelt Institute, was presented to David Levering Lewis.

The 58th annual Francis Parkman Prize for nonfiction was given to Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright/W.W. Norton).

The 12th biennial James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction was awarded to Jacinda Townsend for Saint Monkey (W.W. Norton).

The 55th annual Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize was presented to Justin Leroy, a recent Ph.D. graduate of New York University, for his dissertation “Empire and the Afterlife of Slavery: Black Anti-Imperialisms of the Long Nineteenth Century.”

At the close of the annual dinner on May 11, David Nasaw was succeeded as the Society's president by Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorkers. The author and journalist Tony Horwitz assumed the vice presidency.

Elected to the executive board were George Chauncey, Ann Fabian, Annette Gordon-Reed, Jane Kamensky, Fredrik Logevall, and Tiya Miles.