The winners of the 2009 Bancroft Prize, awarded by Columbia University to the authors of books of "exceptional merit in the fields of American history, biography and diplomacy," are:
- Thomas G. Andrews for Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (Harvard University Press). Andrews is assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado at Denver, and this is his first book.
- Drew Gilpin Faust for This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf). Faust is president of Harvard University and Lincoln Professor of History.
- Pekka Hämäläinen for The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press). Hämäläinen is associate professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Each winner receives $10,000.