Three historians have been named as this year’s winners of the Bancroft Prize, Columbia University announced on Monday. The prizes, which carry a $10,000 award for each author, recognize books “of exceptional merit” published in the previous year in the fields of American history, biography, and diplomacy.

The winners are Allan M. Brandt, a professor of the history of medicine at Harvard Medical School, for The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books); Charles Postel, an assistant professor of history at California State University at Sacramento, for The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press); and Peter Silver, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University, for Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (W.W. Norton & Company). —Charles Huckabee