T.J. Stiles, a biographer and AHA member, received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History for Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (Alfred A. Knopf). The Pulitzer Prize Board described his work as "a rich and surprising new telling of the journey of the iconic American soldier whose death turns out not to have been the main point of his life."

The finalists in the History category included Brian Matthew Jordan for Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (Liveright/Norton); Annie Jacobsen for The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency (Little, Brown & Company); and James M. Scott for Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (W.W. Norton & Company).