American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
This year, join us as we take a look back at Jacqueline Jones’ Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist publication, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (1985). Jones will discuss Labor of Love in relation to her other books and her own family life at the time in 1985. She will also talk about the significance of everyday paid and unpaid labor as a subject for historical study, as well as labor history as a form of political activism.
Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women's History and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of several publications including, No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers During the Civil War Era (forthcoming, 2023) and A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America (2013), which also was a Pulitzer finalist. She has won numerous grants and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1999-2004). She served as President of the American Historical Association in 2021. Jones held Daniels fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society in 1974-1975 to do research for her first book, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 (1980) and was elected to membership in 2008.