Jacqueline Jones

JJones.jpg

Jacqueline Jones is Harry S. Truman Professor of American History at Brandeis University. She specializes in the history of African Americans, labor, women, family and the American South. Jones received her B.A. in American Studies from the University of Delaware, and her Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin. She was chair of the Brandeis history department from 1996 to 2002. Jones’ major publications include a college textbook, Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the American People, coauthored with Peter Wood, Elaine Tyler May, Tim Borstelmann, and Vicki Ruiz (2003, 2004, 2005); a memoir, Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s (2001); a survey of American labor history, A Social History of the Laboring Classes from Colonial Times to the Present (1999); and several monographs, including American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (1998); The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (1992); Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985); and Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 (1980). She is currently writing a book on the history of Savannah, Georgia, during the Civil War era, entitled Saving Savannah: Civil Wars in the Georgia Lowcountry, 1854-1872 (forthcoming, Alfred A. Knopf). Jones is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (1999-2004) and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. She has been awarded the Bancroft Prize in American history, the Taft Prize in American labor history, the Spruill Prize in American southern women’s history, the Brown Prize in African-American women’s history, and the Gustavus Myers Prize in the history of American race relations. Her second book, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Jones is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.