2026 CPH Book Prize

Announcing the Winner of the 2026 Center for Presidential History Book Prize:

Oscar Winberg

Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics (University of North Carolina Press)

Oscar Winberg has produced an insightful and thoroughly entertaining book about the intersection of television and America’s politics and culture during the 1970s, and about how television entertainment continues its influence up through the present day. Winberg tells this story especially through the hit sitcom, “All in the Family,” the most-watched sitcom of the 1970s. Politicians, presidents, campaigns, and broader social movements all capitalized on the show’s popularity by using it for their own agendas: social anxieties, the ERA, government censorship, and more. It is something of an accepted truth that television wields political power. But Winberg argues something specific: that television, rather than serving a higher power (like politics), in fact became the power itself, that the “business model of television entertainment was in fact the real master.” One need look no further than the political rise of Donald Trump as evidence of this phenomenon. Winberg mines a creative combination of archival research in traditional public records and manuscript collections, as well as in the world of pop culture, including show creator Norman Lear’s private archive. A reader might know little-to-nothing about “All in the Family” before reading this book. And after reading, that reader would walk away not only knowing about a television show, but learning about a phenomenon that can teach us about the role of mass media in the evolution of political culture over the last half-century.

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. Dr. Winberg will receive an invitation to deliver the annual CPH Book Prize Lecture at Southern Methodist University during the 2026-27 academic year, as well as a $2,500 prize.

Dr. Oscar Winberg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and the John Morton Center for North American Studies at the University of Turku. His book emerged as the winner from a crowded and strong field of submissions. Other finalists for the 2026 CPH Book Prize included: