Jacqueline Jones (born 1948) is Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin, United States. She is an expert in American social history in addition to writing on economics (also feminist economics), women, and class.
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Born in Delaware, Dr. Jones was the daughter of the head of the Delaware state school board and attended an elementary school now named for her father. She previously held academic positions at Wellesley College, Brown University and Brandeis University. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which she obtained in 1976 after spending time at the University of Delaware. In July 1999 Dr. Jones was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Although she could have used this grant to take time off from her teaching, she decided to wait to begin her research and work through the grant, saying, "I think I will take time off in a few years, but I really like being here on campus, being around my colleagues, teaching." Jones has also been awarded a Ford Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history.
In 1986, one of her most notable publications, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, won her the Bancroft Prize. In Labor of Love Labor of Sorrow, Dr. Jones demonstrates her extensive knowledge of the history of the South from 1830-1915. Her study begins as a study of African Americans and the hardships they faced during the times, but then develops to include commentary on the impact of class and gender on the women in the South at the time. The book goes one to debunk ideas about African Americans and also blend ideas about the hardships of women and blacks into one clear interlaced picture that centers over the black working class woman. Overall, the book is both a historical and feminist writing and stays true to painting a real picture of the country at that time. Dr. Jones noted upon her winning of the MacArthur fellowship that finishing her Bancroft winning inspired her to write her third book, The Dispossessed, America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present, a book which examines poverty in America across races and genders. That book would go on to win her the Choice award for Outstanding book as well as a finalist standing for the Lillian Smith Award for non-fiction. In 2001, Jones published a memoir of her childhood in Delaware in the 1950s. Although her expertise is history, Dr. Jones's books delve into everything from economic policies and their effect on workers to the educational history of America. Her understanding of women's history has gained her recognition outside her own field in feminist circles and she continues to reach more people as her areas of study expand outward still. Her book, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor, was a History Book Club Selection and in 2002 she was named a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As her career has developed, Dr. Jones reflected in an interview that she "... [is] writing about issues of race and class and how the United States has changed over the years, how different groups have viewed each other and interacted, how certain groups have been assigned certain kinds of work." In that sense, history is about people as many of her books would indicate and she continues to find more stories to tell and more ways to show the lives of people from the past. In doing so, Dr. Jones has become a leading figure not only in history but in many other fields as well as her work has expanded there. Her many awards and honors, have not only brought attention to herself but also the subjects of her writings which are, in some cases, still in their infancy. Her most recent book, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War, was published in 2008.