UT professor receives Pulitzer prize for history
AUSTIN (KXAN) — A professor in the University of Texas at Austin's history department was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for history for a book she authored on Black workers in Boston during the Civil War era.
Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women’s History Emerita in the Department of History, where she served as chair from 2014 to 2020, according to the university. She received the Pulitzer for her book “No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era,” published by Basic Books.
The Pulitzer committee praised Jones' "breathtakingly original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston that profoundly reshapes our understanding of the city's abolitionist legacy and the challenging reality for its Black residents."
“I’m honored to win this award, and I’m honored to be able to tell a story that I believe helps us better understand a key part of not only Boston history, but all of American history,” Jones said. “I’m grateful for the support I received for my research at UT over the years from my colleagues in the History Department and from Dean Ann Stevens and former Dean Randy Diehl.”
UT said in a release that throughout her career at the university, Jones has authored numerous books within her area of specialization at the intersection of labor, gender, race and politics.
Jones was also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (1999-2004), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Distinguished Lecturer in the Organization of American Historians, and she won the Taft Prize in Labor History, the Spruill Prize in Southern Women's History, and the Brown Publication Prize in Black Women's History. She also earned research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council, according to UT.
She was also a Pulitzer finalist for “A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America” and “Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present,” which also won the Bancroft Prize.
"We are extremely proud of Professor Jones and this tremendous achievement," said Ann Huff Stevens, dean of UT’s College of Liberal Arts. "Her pathbreaking work in American labor history and the African American experience has left an indelible mark on the field, and there is no greater recognition than a Pulitzer to cement her place in the canon of historians leading this scholarship.”