Jury Members
2009 George Washington Book Prize Jury
Joyce Appleby, who served as chair of the jury, is professor 
emerita of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught for 20 years. She currently acts as co-director of the History News Service, which distributes op-ed essays by historians to more than 300 newspapers. A noted historian of the early national period in American history, Appleby is a former president of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. She earned her Ph.D. in history at Claremont College in 1966. Her first book, Ideology and Economic Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978), won the 1978 Berkshire Prize. Her recent publications include Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Harvard, 2000), Thomas Jefferson (Henry Holt American Presidents Series, 2003), and A Restless Past: History and the American Public (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). W.W. Norton will bring out her The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism in 2009. She has been a member and chair of the Council of the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg and has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and the William and Mary Quarterly. In 2009, the Society of American Historians awarded Appleby the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Award for Distinguished Writing in American History.
Ira Berlin is a leading historian of African-American life and a
Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Maryland, where he has also served as Dean of Undergraduates and of the College of Arts and Humanities. He earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin in 1970. His first book, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (The New Press, 1974), was awarded the Best First Book Prize by the National Historical Society. He has authored or edited many other books about what he calls the "striking diversity" of life under slavery, including Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard, 1998) and Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Harvard, 2003). In 1991, the Maryland Department of Education named him the state's Outstanding Educator. He is the founder of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which he directed until 1991. He has been awarded numerous fellowships and grants, including a Guggenheim and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has served on the Advisory Board of the National Archives, chair of the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and president of the Organization of American Historians.
Jay Winik is one of the country's leading public historians, 
renowned for his gifted approaches to history. A regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal as well as The New York Times, he is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller April 1865: The Month that Saved America (HarperCollins, 2001), a book that had the rare distinction of becoming an instant classic and which became an award-winning documentary on the History Channel. He is also the author of the bestselling The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 (Harper, 2007), a USA Today and Financial Times best book of the year. Winik received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University and a Master's from the London School of Economics. He has been a lead commentator on frequent PBS and History Channel documentary specials, and was the Presidential Historian for Fox News's coverage of Barack Obama’s historic inauguration. A senior scholar of history and public policy at the University of Maryland, he sits on the governing council of the National Endowment for the Humanities and has served as a trustee on a number of other nonprofit boards, including American Heritage Magazine, the Civil War Preservation Trust, the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, the James Madison Book Award, Ford's Theatre, and The Lincoln Forum.
2008 George Washington Book Prize Jury
Robert L. Middlekauff, Chair,
University of California, Berkeley
Elizabeth A. Fenn,
Duke University
Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy,
University of Virginia
2007 George Washington Book Prize Jury
Richard Lyman Bushman, Chair, Columbia University
Theodore J. Crackel, University of Virginia
Pauline Maier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2006 George Washington Book Prize Jury
Gordon Wood, Chair, Brown University
Carol Berkin, Baruch College
Walter Isaacson, Aspen Institute
2005 George Washington Book Prize Jury
Don Higginbotham, Chair, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Philip Morgan, Johns Hopkins University
Barbara Oberg, Princeton University
