Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
The Ralph Waldo Emerson Award is a non-fiction literary award given by the Phi Beta Kappa society, the oldest academic society of the United States, for books that have made the most significant contributions to the humanities. Albert William Levi won the first of these awards, in 1960.Winners
- 1960: Albert William Levi, Philosophy and the Modern World
- 1961: W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy
- 1962: Herbert J. Muller, Freedom in the Ancient World
- 1963: Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life
- 1964: Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of An Idea in America
- 1965: Howard Mumford Jones, '
- 1966: John Herman Randall, Jr., The Career of Philosophy: From the German Enlightenment to the Age of Darwin
- 1967: Robert Coles, '
- 1968: Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
- 1969: Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider
- 1970: Rollo May, Love and Will
- 1971: Charles A. Barker, American Convictions: Cycles of Public Thought, 1600-1850
- 1972: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
- 1973: Barrington Moore, Jr., Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them
- 1974: Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic
- 1975: Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam
- 1976: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
- 1977: Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914
- 1978: Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930
- 1979: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press As an Agent of Change, Volumes I and II
- 1980: Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World
- 1981: George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History
- 1982: Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations
- 1983: Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945
- 1984: David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture
- 1985: Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation
- 1986: Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China
- 1987: Alfred W. Crosby, '
- 1988: David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor
- 1989: Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunication in Early Christianity
- 1990: William L. Vance, America’s Rome, Volumes I and II
- 1991: Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought
- 1992: Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
- 1993: Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States
- 1994: David Levering Lewis, '
- 1995: Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 220-1336
- 1996: Eloise Quiñones Keber, Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript
- 1997: Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity
- 1998: Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
- 1999: H.C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany
- 2000: Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life
- 2001: Debora Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art
- 2002: Fredric L. Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours
- 2003: David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History
- 2004: Jennifer Michael Hecht, The End of the Soul
- 2005: Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany
- 2006: Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World
- 2007: David Brion Davis, '
- 2008: Leor Halevi, Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society
- 2009: Peter Trachtenberg, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning
- 2010: Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy
- 2011: Timothy Snyder, '
- 2012: Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse
- 2013: Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
- 2014: David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition
- 2015: Joan Breton Connelly, The Parthenon Enigma: A New Understanding of the West’s Most Iconic Building and the People Who Made It
- 2016: E.M. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe
- 2017: Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
- 2018: Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919
- 2019: Sarah E. Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
