Center for Presidential History Book Prize

Announcing the Winner of the 2025 Center for Presidential History Book Prize:

Susan Gaunt Stearns

Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade

The CPH Book Prize Committee unanimously praised Stearns' work, which argues that from 1783-1803, access to trade and market networks via the Mississippi River played an absolutely central role in the political, economic, and geographic history of the nation. The U.S. from its inception depended on a system of governance that could integrate distant and diverse regions into a centralized commercial and political network. And no single issue was more important for this strategy, Stearns argues, than the Mississippi River. The committee agreed: Stearns' book requires that we deeply consider this river-focused story and "think anew about the early republic, including some of the most critical moments of the era, including the Constitutional Convention, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Louisiana Purchase."

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. Susan Gaunt Stearns will receive a $2,500 prize and an invitation to deliver the annual CPH Book Prize Lecture at Southern Methodist University in February of 2026.

Dr. Susan Gaunt Stearns is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi. Her book emerged as the winner from a crowded and strong field of submissions. Other finalists included:

Kuan-Jen Chen, Charting America's Cold War Water in East Asia: Sovereignty, Local Interests, and International Security (Cambridge)

Brianna Nofil, The Migrant's Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration (Princeton)

Eva Payne, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution (Princeton)

Cara Rogers Stevens, Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery (Kansas)

 

The CPH will accept submissions for the 2026 CPH Book Prize in the Fall of 2025.

For complete submission guidelines, click here.

Past winners of the CPH Book Prize include:

  • 2024 - Sheyda Jahanbani, The Poverty of the World: Rediscovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1941-1968 (Oxford UP)
  • 2023 - Fritz Bartel, The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Harvard UP) 

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