Center for Presidential History Book Prize

The CPH Book Prize is awarded annually for a distinguished first book published in English, in any aspect in the field of United States presidential history, broadly defined. The CPH encourages you to peruse our past winners and finalists to get a sense of the breadth of excellent submissions.

The prize winner will receive $2,500 and an invitation to deliver the annual CPH Book Prize Lecture at Southern Methodist University in the following academic year. The CPH will pay all author’s travel expenses and deliver the prize at the lecture.

Submissions for the 2027 prize are now open. Click here to submit. Submissions and their accompanying books must be postmarked by November 15, 2026 to be eligible for the 2027 CPH Book Prize. For complete submission guidelines, click here.

Past winners of the CPH Book Prize include:

• 2026 - Oscar Winberg, Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics (University of North Carolina Press)
• 2025 - Susan Gaunt Stearns, Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade (University of Virginia Press)
• 2024 - Sheyda Jahanbani, The Poverty of the World: Rediscovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1941-1968 (Oxford University Press)
• 2023 - Fritz Bartel, The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press)

For questions, please contact the prize administrator at rspitz@smu.edu.