Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emeritus at UNC-Chapel Hill. She was one of the founders of the modern field of women’s history and helped to spark a thriving scholarship in southern labor history and to turn the study of the civil rights movement in new directions. She was awarded a National Humanities Medal for her efforts to deepen the nation’s engagement with the humanities by “recording history through the lives of ordinary people, and, in so doing, for making history.” She is past president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association and founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association. Her books and articles include Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (1979, 1993); Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987, 2000); and “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History (2005), an effort to challenge the myth that the movement was a short, successful bid to overcome segregation in the Jim Crow South. She has won awards for graduate teaching and contributions to the fields of oral history and working-class history. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, and other institutions. She was elected to the Society of American Historians in 1990 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, in 2011. Her most recent book, Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America (2019), won the 2020 PEN America/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the 2020 Summersell Prize for the best book on the history of the American South, and the 2020 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers for outstanding work by a trade press. It was a finalist for the Plutarch Award from Biographers International. In 2020, she and Bruce Baker edited, introduced, and published Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin’s book Eli Hill: A Novel of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press).

Ten Things I Can’t Do Without in the Midst of Disaster

1. A husband I enjoy being with
2. A house and a yard that gives us room to roam
3. Trees (I find myself taking so much solace in nature.)
4. My siblings, nieces, and nephews
5. Friends
6. Healthcare professionals I can count on and whom I’ve known so long that they have become friends
7. Intellectual/political work to keep doing
8. Things to read
9. Living in a state that, despite failures and challenges, remains a battleground—a place worth fighting for
10. The hope inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests