While the Nobel prizes were established by Alfred Nobel’s will in 1896 to honor outstanding invention, literary work or “work for fraternity among nations,” like the Olympics, they have also taken on implications of national competition and prestige in a century of laureates. While the United States has dominated in sciences since the Second World War, the Nobel prizes as a whole offer an interesting representation of global recognition of American prowess and position; in the last prize established— economics—the US has averaged one laureate per year since the award’s creation in 1969. Within the United States, moreover, the laureates also participate in institutional competition among elite colleges: for example, the economics prize has consistently recognized professors at the University of Chicago, Harvard, MIT and Yale. Moreover, laureates have sometimes banded together to exercise their authority: fortyfour laureates sought a speedy end to Vietnam in 1970, while seventy laureates at work in California in 1974 protested the inroads of scientific creationism in schools.

Prior to the Second World War, nonetheless, acknowledgement of Americans and Americanbased researchers proved scant. United States citizens won their earliest recognition as peace laureates, recognizing efforts of mediation and global organization by US presidents (Theodore Roosevelt, 1906; Woodrow Wilson, 1919) and Secretaries of State (Elihu Root, 1912; Frank Kellogg, 1929). As America became a global power stage, officials were honored less frequently, although the Nobel committee recognized three further Secretaries of State: Cordell Hull (1945) for work in the UN; George Marshall (1953) for plans to rebuild postwar Europe (1953); and Henry Kissinger (1973) for negotiation of Vietnam peace agreements—an award some Americans found distasteful. Instead, the modern Nobel Peace Prize has recognized American women and minorities who have stood outside the construction of foreign policy including the African Americans Ralph Bunche (1950) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964), peace activists Jane Addams (1931) and Emily Balch (1946); and Jody Williams (1998), who has organized a global campaign against landmines. Other Peace awards recognized chemistry laureate/activist Linus Pauling (1962) and immigrant Elie Wiesel (1986) for his documentation of the Holocaust.

In literature, American recognition came more slowly Novelist Sinclair Lewis became the first American laureate in 1930, followed by playwright Eugene O’Neill (1936) and novelist Pearl Buck (1938). After the war, émigré T.S. Elliot received the prize in 1948, followed by Southern novelist William Faulkner (1949). Thereafter, prizes have shifted from archtypically white male American authors—Ernest Hemingway (1954), John Steinbeck (1962) and Saul Bellow (1976)—to more diverse voices, including Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), émigré poet Joseph Brodsky (1987) and African American novelist Toni Morrison (1993).

In sciences and medicine, as Harriet Zuckerman notes in her Scientific Elite (1977), the evolution of American recognition has been more dramatic. Prior to the Second World War, more than 25 percent of all laureates were German; Americans received no prizes in medicine and physiology until 1933. Between 1945 and 1976, however, more than half of all laureates were American-based, although this included a sizeable immigrant population as well as American-born researchers. Since Zuckerman’s study, the intensity of investment in sciences has tended to substantiate continuing American domination of scientific categories: more than half of all chemistry awards in the 1990s, for example, went to scholars working in the US, although their origins ranged from Mexico to Egypt to Hungary; physics shows a similar pattern. In addition, many of those considered highly eligible have American affiliations each year.

This research hegemony is also contested among schools who publicize laureates among their faculty alumni and passing researchers. Thus, Harvard, MIT, Yale, the University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology the Rockefeller University and the California State system reaffirm their superiority as research institutions (and their possibility of producing further laureates). Yet, laureates have also been associated with CUNY, Washington University and the University of Houston.

This recognition can also be read in terms of changing interests as well as investments and power. In this sense, a more regular pace of Americans in literature or peace prizes represents America participating in global systems as partner and interlocutor, while scientific awards represent an American agenda and the wealth of the American century.