This program, launched in 1999 with a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was designed to use the prestige of the AHA—by conferring the bluest of ribbons awarded by the grandest of juries with the full authority of the AHA behind it—to set a high standard for electronic publishing. By legitimizing electronic publishing, the AHA hopes to change attitudes of academics toward e-books. By making most of the new media, the program may also contribute to a new conception of the book itself as a vehicle of knowledge.
Between 1999 and 2004, the AHA awarded Gutenberg-e prizes to high quality dissertations from many different fields and topics in history. A distinguished panel of scholars judged the dissertations, selecting the award recipients primarily on the scholarly merits of the dissertations. Each prize consisted of a US $20,000 fellowship to be used by the author to convert the dissertation into an electronic monograph of the highest quality to be published by Columbia University Press.