The Jameson Award was established by Council in 1974 to be awarded every five years for outstanding achievement in the editing of historical sources. The prize, which was first offered in 1980, honors J. Franklin Jameson, a founding member of the Association, its president in 1907, and an influential proponent of historical study. In 2007 the AHA Council made the decision to change the frequency of the award from every five years to biennially.

There is no monetary prize, but the winner receives a certificate in recognition of the award. To be eligible for consideration, works must be of a scholarly, historical nature; review or journal editing is not eligible.

2023
Kevin Terraciano, Codex Sierra: A Nahuatl-Mixtec Book of Accounts from Colonial Mexico (Univ. of Oklahoma Press

2021
Hani Khafipour, editor, The Empires of the Near East and India: Source Studies of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal Literate Communities (Columbia Univ. Press)

2019
Bettine Birge, Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan: Cases from the Yuan dianzhang (Harvard Univ. Press)

2017
Karsten Friis-Jensen and Peter Fisher, translator, Saxo Grammaticus: Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes, 2 vols. (Oxford Univ. Press)

2015
Emily Levine, Witness: A Hunkpapha Historian's Strong-Heart Song of the Lakotas by Josephine Waggoner (Univ. of Nebraska Press)
David Luscombe, The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise (Oxford Univ. Press)

2013
Wendy Childs, John Taylor, and Leslie Watkiss, The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, Vol. II: 1394-1422 (Clarendon Press and Oxford Univ. Press)

2011
Pamela Long, David McGee, and Alan Stahl, The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript, 3 vols. (MIT Press)

2009
Jean Yellin, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

2005
Eleanor Darcy, Ronald Hoffman, and Sally Mason, Dear Papa, Dear Charley: The Peregrinations of a Revolutionary Aristocrat (Maryland Hist. Soc., Maryland State Archives, and Univ. of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Inst. of Early American History and Culture)

2000
Rolena Adorno and Patrick Pautz, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, three volumes (Univ. of Nebraska Press)

1995
Richard Ryerson, Adams Family Correspondence, vols. 5 and 6(Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press), and others from the Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

1990
Gary Moulton, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 5 vols, including an atlas vol. (Univ. of Nebraska Press)

1985
Ira Berlin, Joseph Reidy, and Leslie Rowland, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, Series II: The Black Military Experience (Cambridge Univ. Press)

1980
Harold Syrett, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (Columbia Univ. Press)