Jacqueline Jones

Jacqueline Jones is the author of several books, including, most recently, A Dreadful Deceit:  The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America (2013).  That book and Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow:  Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (25^th Anniversary Edition, 2010) were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; Labor of Love won the Bancroft Prize for 1986.  Other works include  Saving Savannah:  The City and the Civil War, 1854-1872 (2008);  Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s (2001); A Social History of the Laboring Classes from Colonial Times to the Present (1999);  American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (1998);  The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (1993); and Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 (1992). She has won numerous grants and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1999-2004). She served as Vice President for the Professional Division of the American Historical Association from 2011 to 2014. Her current project is a full-length biography of Lucy Parsons, orator and labor agitator, who was born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851.

*Since the NEH was founded, the agency has awarded more than $171 million to nearly three thousand projects on African American history and culture. Jones has been a recipient of NEH funding.

AFFILIATION: University of Texas at Austin