Jacqueline Jones

Notable work and positions

University of Texas at Austin - Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women's History Emerita
American Historical Association - Past President

Biography

Jacqueline Jones (born June 17, 1948, in Delaware) is an American social historian. She held the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin from 2008 to 2017, where she served as chair of the history department from 2014 to 2020, and is now Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women's History Emerita. She previously taught at Wellesley College and Brandeis University. Her scholarship focuses on American social history, labor, race, slavery, class, and feminist economics. She won the Bancroft Prize in American History for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985), which was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist, as was her 2013 book A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America. In 2024, she won the Pulitzer Prize in History for No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era (2023), which the Pulitzer jury cited for its 'original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston.' She is a MacArthur Fellow (1999-2004) and past president of the American Historical Association. She is the author of ten history books and co-author of a U.S. history survey textbook, Created Equal: A History of the United States.

Career highlights

• Pulitzer Prize in History 2024, for No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era.
• Bancroft Prize in American History 1986, for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow.
• MacArthur Fellowship 1999-2004.