Jones (left) and Woo (right) speaking at AAS
Two American Antiquarian Society members won the Pulitzer Prize for 2024.
Jacqueline Jones (elected 2008) won the prize in History for No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era. Jones delivered the Robert C. Baron Lecture in 2022, reflecting on her earlier book, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the 1980s). She was among our earliest classes of fellows in the 1970s.
Ilyon Woo (elected April 2023) won the prize in Biography for Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom. Woo, who spoke about this book at AAS last year, was a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellow in 2004-5. She did much of the research for her Pulitzer-winning work at AAS.
In addition, Elliott West (elected April 2013) was a finalist for the history prize for his book Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion.)
These are the eighty-first and eighty-second Pulitzer-winning books by AAS members, and the first since 2019.