The 2024 Ruth Ratner Miller Award for Excellence in American History
The 2024 Ruth Ratner Miller Memorial Award for Excellence in American History: Jacqueline Jones
Saturday, October 19, 7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Goodwin Forum, Main Library
The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library are thrilled to announce the winner of this year’s Ruth Ratner Miller Award for Excellence in American History: Concord resident Jacqueline Jones.
Born in Delaware, Dr. Jones received a B.A. in 1970 from the University of Delaware and a Ph.D. in 1976 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has held academic positions at Wellesley College, Brown University, and Brandeis University, among other institutions. She is Professor Emerita, Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History, and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin. “I’m deeply honored to be the recipient of this year’s Miller Award and to join such an eminent group of past winners,” said Jones.” I hope we can all take inspiration from Ruth Ratner Miller’s belief that an understanding of history — no matter how difficult the issues it forces us to confront— is a civic duty that we as Americans share with one another.”
As an American social historian, Jones has authored several books, including most recently, No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era (2023), winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History, and Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons (2017). She is also the author of A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America (2013). That book and Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; Labor of Love won the Bancroft Prize for 1986. Jones was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship as well as fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies.
Other works include Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War, 1854-1872 (2008); Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s (2001); A Social History of the Laboring Classes from Colonial Times to the Present (1999); American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (1998); The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (1993); and Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 (1992).
About the Miller Award:
Established in 1998, the Miller Award is given each year in memory of Ruth Ratner Miller by her four children to honor the life of their mother, Ruth, who believed passionately that understanding history was not merely desirable but a civic and religious duty. Previous recipients of the award include Annette Gordon-Reed, Nathaniel Philbrick, David Hackett Fischer, Jill Lepore, Heather Cox Richardson, and Sean Wilentz, among other esteemed historians.
[Register for the 2024 Miller Award Event]
The event is generously sponsored by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library.
Videos of many of the past Miller Award events can be seen on the YouTube Ruth Ratner Miller Award playlist.
Past Miller Award Recipients are:
1998 Stephen Ambrose
1999 James M. McPherson
2000 Thomas H. O'Connor
2001 Daniel J. Boorstin
2002 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
2003 Sandra Day O'Connor
2004 Edmund S. Morgan
2005 David Halberstam
2006 Doris Kearns Goodwin
2007 John Hope Franklin
2008 David Hackett Fischer
2009 David Herbert Donald
2010 Bernard Bailyn
2011 Pauline Maier
2012 Eric Foner
2013 Drew Gilpin Faust
2014 Nathaniel Philbrick
2015 Robert Dallek
2016 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
2017 Gordon S. Wood
2018 Annette Gordon-Reed
2019 John Stauffer
2020 Jill Lepore
2021 Heather Cox Richardson
2022 Sean Wilentz
2023 Robert Gross