Jacqueline Jones

Jacqueline Jones is a social historian whose scholarship examines the experience of workers through the lens of economic transformations throughout American history. Her writings on African American women's, southern, and labor history explore such diverse themes as the transition from slavery to free labor, the rise of the global assembly line, and the history of the American, labor union movement. Her writings combine acute analytic skills with extensive research grounded in primary sources. In her book, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (1998), Jones studies the experiences of various kinds of American workers—waged and unwaged, urban and rural—in the context of the economic transformations that have occurred throughout American history. Jones is the Harry S. Truman Professor of American Civilization at Brandeis University. She is also the author of Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 (1980), Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985), The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (1992), and A Social History of the Laboring Classes: From Colonial Times to the Present (1999). Jones received a B.A. (1970) from the University of Delaware and a Ph.D. (1976) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.