A follow-on question from this one: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c2jd2/historians_what_do_you_think_about_the/
... where white_light-king points out that "nominated for the Pulitzer Prize" is a pretty meaningless phrase.
So my question, and I'm only referring to the History award: is this award a guarantee of quality? Or do controversial awards take place, reflecting the political bias of the judges? (I realise no one can be 100% impartial, of course!) Can I spend my hard-earned money on a PP winning book, safe in the knowledge that I'm going to be reading something reasonably accurate?
The Pulitzer Prize nominations are considered, within the journalism community, an award almost as much as the Prize itself.
This is mostly due to the fact that the nominations are announced the same time as the winner, and thus function as "runner-ups," as opposed to in other awards where the nominations are the leadup of finalists to the winner.
In some years, there have been no winners awarded, though nominations were announced, because the Pulitzer committee considered no work that year to be sufficient for an actual award, but some work sufficient for recognition.
Keep in mind too, awards are recognition of craft by a particular group within their field. In which case the Pulitzer prize winner you're mentioning was awarded by journalists, not historians, and likely for the craft of narrative writing, than the craft of scholarly history.
Just like a book that might win an award for scholarly history for completely changing the field, might not see a lick of interest in popular non-fiction.
And consider too, books that may have previously been awarded, even by historians, might be later refuted or greatly modified.
So consider awards as not some be all and end all of quality, but more as a legitimizer of the contemporary interests of the groups bestowing the award, at that time.