History Book Award Season is upon us and we couldn’t be more pleased.

Lions of Little Rock by Kristin Levine has been awarded the New-York Historical Society’s first children’s history book prize. The annual award is given for the best American history book, fiction or nonfiction, for readers ages 9 to 12.

“This story could have been a didactic one,” Tanya Lee Stone wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “It could have preached progress over stagnation, tolerance over bigotry, community over divisiveness.” Ms. Levine “certainly weaves these ideals throughout, but they never overshadow what is most important here, a friendship between two people so strong it can overcome the worst of storms.”

The George Washington Book Prize, created by Washington College 10 years ago, recognizes the year’s best books on the nation’s Founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history. The Finalists for the 2014 George Washington Book Prize are:

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy for The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (Yale)

Jeffrey L. Pasley for The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy (Kansas)

Alan Taylor for The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832  (W.W. Norton & Co.)

The $50,000 George Washington Book Prize honors its namesake by recognizing the year’s best new books on early American history.

The winner of the annual George Washington Book Prize will be announced May 20, 2014 at Mount Vernon.