The Avery O. Craven Award, first given in 1985, is awarded annually by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) for the most original history book on the coming of the American Civil War, the Civil War years (1861–1865), or the Era of Reconstruction (1875–1877), with the exception of works of purely military history. The exception recognizes and reflects Craven's Quaker convictions. Professor Avery O. Craven was President of the Organization of American Historians, 1963-1964.
A 3-member committee, chosen by the OAH President, picks the winner. The winner receives $200.00. Co-winners were named in 1998 and 2008. In 2002, the winner Don E. Fehrenbacher had died in 1997, but a former student of Fehrenbacher's completed and edited the book in time for the 2002 award schedule.
In the table below, the link on the author is the most recent available. Priority is given to a “Wikipedia” entry. The link to the “Affiliation”—usually an academic institution appointment—is that affiliation at the time the award was given.
| Year | Winner | Affiliation | Book Title |
| 1985 | Michael Perman[1] | University of Illinois at Chicago | Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 |
| 1986 | Dan T. Carter | Emory University | When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South 1865-1867 |
| 1987 | Clarence L. Mohr[2] | Tulane University | On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia |
| 1988co | William E. Gienapp[3] | University of Wyoming | The Origins of the Republican Party 1852-1856 |
| 1988co | Peter Kolchin[4] | University of Delaware | Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom |
| 1989 | Eric Foner[5] | Columbia University | Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 |
| 1990 | Lewis P. Simpson[6] | Louisiana State University | Mind and the American Civil War: A Meditation on Lost Causes |
| 1991 | Grace Palladino[7] | AFL-CIO | Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840-68 |
| 1992 | William S. McFeely | University of Georgia | Frederick Douglass |
| 1993 | Tyler Anbinder[8] | George Washington University | Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s |
| 1994 | Eric Lott | University of Virginia | Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class |
| 1995 | Julie Saville[9] | University of Chicago | The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 |
| 1996 | David Gollaher | California Healthcare Institute | Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix |
| 1997 | Drew Gilpin Faust | University of Pennsylvania | Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War |
| 1998co | William G. Shade[10] | Lehigh University | Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System,1824-1861 |
| 1998co | Mark M. Smith | University of South Carolina | Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South |
| 1999 | Amy Dru Stanley | University of Chicago | From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation |
| 2000 | Walter Johnson[11] | New York University | Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market |
| 2001 | Lyde Cullen Sizer[12] | Sarah Lawrence College | The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872 |
| 2002 | Don E. Fehrenbacher | Stanford University | The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery |
| 2002note | Ward M. McAfee [13] | California State University, San Bernardino | A former student of Fehrenbacher's, McAfee completed and edited the 2002 award book. |
| 2003 | John Stauffer[14] | Harvard University | The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race |
| 2004 | Dylan C. Penningroth[15] | Northwestern University | The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South |
| 2005 | C. Wyatt Evans[16] | Drew University | The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy |
| 2006 | Anne Sarah Rubin[17] | University of Maryland, Baltimore County | A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 |
| 2007 | Mark Elliott[18] | Wagner College | Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson |
| 2008 | Chandra Manning[19] | Georgetown University | What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War |
| 2009 | Edward B. Rugemer[20] | Yale University | The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War |
| 2010 | Hannah Rosen[21] | University of Michigan | Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Post-Emancipation South |