Congratulations to UNP author Elliott West for being a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist!

The Pulitzer Prize in History is awarded to a distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States. The prize-winner was Jacqueline Jones for her book No Right to an Honest Living. West was a finalist for his book Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion.

A masterly crafted and comprehensive narrative of how our nation’s history unfolded across the American West and how the West, no less than the Civil War, profoundly shaped the rise of modern America.

–The History Pulitzer Prize Jury

Continental Reckoning presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life.

View the official announcement here.

UNP is the publisher of Scoreboard, Baby coauthored by the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner in Investigative Journalism, Ken Armstrong, as well as Empires, Nations, and Families by Anne F. Hyde which was a 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History.