"I guess winning the Pulitzer Prize in History is a dream come true," Daniel Walker Howe writes on the Oxford UP blog, a few weeks after his history of the early United States, What Hath God Wrought, was tapped for that honor. The book took him a decade to write, he observes, and "when you’ve put a lot of work into something, it’s nice to feel that someone has noticed."

Howe also notes that this book—his fourth—is the first in which he's explicitly sought a wide readership among "the general, literate, curious public." Sounds like that plan worked!