For a distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton & Company), a painstaking exploration of a sprawling multi-generation slave family that casts provocative new light on the relationship between Sally Hemings and her master, Thomas Jefferson.

Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University, presents the 2009 History prize to Annette Gordon-Reed.

Finalists

Also nominated as finalists in this category were: “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” by Drew Gilpin Faust (Alfred A. Knopf), a deeply researched, gracefully written examination of how a divided nation struggled to comprehend the meaning and practical consequences of unprecedented human carnage; and “The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s,” by G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot (The Penguin Press), an elegantly written account of a brief period in American history that left a profoundly altered national landscape.