Jacqueline Jones, the Truman Professor of American Civilization, received word of her MacArthur "Genius" Award on her birthday. The author of seven books, Professor Jones teaches courses in American history to undergraduate and graduate students. Her works include, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 (University of North Carolina Press, 1980: University of Georgia Press, 1992); a study of teachers who went south after the Civil War to teach blacks; Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family (Basic Books, 1985: Vintage, 1986), a history of black working women, which led to her third book about poor whites, The Dispossessed: American's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (Basic Books, 1992). She is also the author of American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (W. W. Norton, 1998) and A Social History of the Laboring Classes from Colonial Times to the Present (Blackwell Publishers, 1999). Her sixth book, Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s, (University of Delaware Press, 2001) is a memoir and study of the area in which she grew up. Professor Jones's latest work is Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the American People (Addison, Wesley, Longman, 2003).
A perusal of our history department faculty , reveals the likes of not only Professor Jones, but David Hackett Fischer, author of Washington's Crossing and Paul Revere's Ride; Jane Kamensky, the cofounder of the award-winning online magazine Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life; and Ibrahim Sundiata, whose new book, Brothers and Strangers, Black Zion, Black Slavery, 1914-1940, explores the reasons for Marcus Garvey's failed attempts in the 1920s to establish a homeland in Liberia for African Americans.