The annual best-article award is named in memory of Lester J. Cappon. Lester Cappon edited the Quarterly from 1955 to 1956, and again in 1963. He was the Institute’s first editor of the book program (1945–1954) and served as Institute director from 1954 until 1969. The award carries a cash prize of $500 and is funded by the Institute. (From 1965 until 2005, the award was supported by the National Society, Daughters of Colonial Wars.)
* notes those articles that also won the Adair Award
| Year of Award | Article | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Co-winners | |
| Kristie Flannery, “Can the Devil Cross the Deep Blue Sea? Imagining the Spanish Pacific and Vast Early America from Below” | January | |
| Melanie Newton, “Counterpoints of Conquest: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Lesser Antilles, and the Ethnocartography of Genocide” | April | |
| 2021 | Kathryn M. de Luna, “Sounding the African Atlantic” | October |
| 2020 | Co-winners | |
| Jenny Shaw, “In the Name of the Mother: The Story of Susannah Mingo, A Woman of Color in the Early English Atlantic” | April | |
| Elizabeth Ellis, “The Natchez War Revisited: Violence, Multinational Settlements, and Indigenous Diplomacy in the Lower Mississippi Valley” | July | |
| 2019 | Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly, “Singing Box 331: Re-Sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives” | October |
| 2018 | Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn” | April |
| 2017 | Juliana Barr,“There’s No Such Thing as ‘Prehistory’: What the Longue Durée of Caddo and Pueblo History Tells Us about Colonial America” | April |
| 2016 | *Rebecca Earle, “The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification, and Colonialism” | July |
| 2015 | Co-Winners | |
| Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The African Supplement: Religion, Race, and Corporate Law in Early National America” | July | |
| Jeffrey Ostler, “‘To Extirpate the Indians’: An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes, 1776–1810” | October | |
| 2014 | Molly Warsh, “A Political Ecology in the Early Spanish Caribbean” | October |
| 2013 | Co-Winners | |
| Robert Michael Morrissey, “Kaskaskia Social Network: Kinship and Assimilation in the French-Illinois Borderlands, 1695–1735” | January | |
| Cary Carson, “Banqueting Houses and the Need of Society among Slave-Owning Planters in the Chesapeake Colonies” | October | |
| 2012 | Co-Winners | |
| Chris Evans, “The Plantation Hoe: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Commodity, 1650–1850” | January | |
| Diana Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law, and Atlantic Slavery” | April | |
| 2011 | Juliana Barr, “Geographies of Power: Mapping Indian Borders in the ‘Borderlands’ of the Early Southwest” | January |
| 2010 | Co-Winners | |
| Susan Scott Parrish, “Richard Ligon and the Atlantic Science of Commonwealth” | April | |
| Caroline Winterer, “Model Empire, Lost City: Ancient Carthage and the Science of Politics in Revolutionary America” | January | |
| 2009 | Gregory E. O’Malley, “Beyond the Middle Passage: Slave Migration from the Caribbean to North America, 1619–1807” | January |
| 2008 | Kathleen DuVal, “Indian Intermarriage and Métissage in Colonial Louisiana” | April |
| 2007 | Stephanie E. Smallwood, “African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic” | October |
| 2006 | Michael A. McDonnell, “Class War? Class Struggles during the American Revolution in Virginia” | April |
| 2005 | David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in Seventeenth-Century Martha’s Vineyard” | April |
| 2004 | Daniel Vickers, “Those Dammed Shad: Would the River Fisheries of New England Have Survived in the Absence of Industrialization?” | October |
| 2003 | Clare A. Lyons, “Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia” | January |
| 2002 | Stephen Conways, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739-1783” | January |
| 2001 | Michael Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators” | October |
| 2000 | Susan Juster, “Mystical Pregnancy and Holy Bleeding: Visionary Experience in Early Modern Britain and America” | April |
| 1999 | Christopher L. Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution” | April |
| 1998 | Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Wheels, Looms, and the Gender Division of Labor in Eighteenth-Century New England” | January |
| 1997 | Holly Brewer, “Entailing Artistocracy in Colonial Virginia: ‘Ancient Feudal Restraints’ and Revolutionary Reform” | April |
| 1996 | Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America” | April |
| 1995 | Martin Quitt, “Trade and Acculturation at Jamestown, 1607–609: The Limits of Understanding” | April |
| 1994 | Daniel Scott Smith, “Continuity and Discontinuity in Puritan Naming: Massachusetts, 1771” | January |
| 1993 | T. H. Breen, “Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution” | July |
| 1992 | Patricia Seed, “Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empire” | April |
| 1991 | *Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village” | January |
| 1990 | *Daniel F. Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America” | January |
| 1989 | John Brooke, “To the Quiet of the People: Revolutionary Settlements and Civil Unrest in Western Massachusetts, 1774–1789” | July |
| 1988 | Isaac Kramnick, “The ‘Great National Discussion’: The Discourse of Politics in 1787” | January |
| 1987 | *Daniel W. Howe, “The Political Psychology of The Federalist” | July |
| 1986 | Peter S. Onuf, “Liberty, Development, and Union: Visions of the West in the 1780s” | April |
| 1985 | Melvin B. Endy, Jr., “Just War, Holy War, and Millennialism in Revolutionary America” | January |
| 1984 | Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, “Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts” | July |
| 1983 | Co-Winners | |
| W. J. Eccles, “The Fur Trade and Eighteenth-Century Imperialism” | July | |
| Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience” | October | |
| 1982 | *Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century” | July |
| 1981 | *Alfred F. Young, “George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742–1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution” | October |
| 1980 | Jeffrey J. Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conflict in North Carolina, 1775 to 1802” | January |
| 1979 | Co-Winners | |
| Ralph Lerner, “Commerce and Character: The Anglo-American as New-Model Man” | January | |
| Peter N. Moogk, “‘Thieving Buggers’ and ‘Stupid Sluts’: Insults and Popular Culture in New France” | October | |
| 1978 | Drew R. McCoy, “Benjamin Franklin’s Vision of a Republican Political Economy for America” | October |
| 1977 | Catherine M. Scholten, “‘On the Importance of the Obstetrick Art’: Changing Customs of Childbirth in America, 1760 to 1825” | July |
| 1976 | Gary B. Nash, “Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia” | January |
| 1975 | T. H. Breen, “Persistent Localism: English Social Change and the Shaping of New England Institutions” | January |
| 1974 | *Rhys Isaac, “Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists’ Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765 to 1775” | July |
| 1973 | T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts Immigration” | April |
| 1972 | Norman S. Fiering, “Will and Intellect in the New England Mind” | October |
| 1971 | Allan Kulikoff, “The Progress of Inequality in Revolutionary Boston” | July |
| 1970 | *Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America” | January |
| 1969 | Robert M. Weir, “`The Harmony We Were Famous For’: An Interpretation of Pre-Revolutionary South Carolina Politics” | October |
| 1968 | Michael Zuckerman, “The Social Context of Democracy in Massachusetts” | October |
| 1967 | *Edmund S. Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution” | January |
| 1966 | Philip J. Greven, Jr., “Family Structure in Seventeenth-Century Andover, Massachusetts” | April |
| 1965 | H. Roy Merrens, “Historical Geography and Early American History” | October |