Jacquelyn Dowd Hall


Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is an American historian and Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her scholarship and teaching forwarded the emergence of U.S. women's history in the 1960s and 1970s, helped to inspire new research on Southern labor history and the long civil rights movement, and encouraged the use of oral history sources in historical research. She is the author of Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching; ''Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World and Sisters and Rebels: The Struggle for the Soul of America''.

Early life and education

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall was born in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, in 1943, the oldest of five children. After graduating from high school as valedictorian, she attended Memphis Southwestern College, where she first became involved in the civil rights movement when she joined student protests against segregation. In 1965, she graduated from Southwestern with high honors.
In 1967, she earned a Master of Arts from Columbia University. Studying under Kenneth T. Jackson, she completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University, with distinction, in 1974. Her dissertation, which became her first book, won the Bancroft Award for the best dissertation in American history, diplomacy, or international relations.

Career

Hall worked as a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines in 1965 and 1966.
In 1970, she moved from New York City to Atlanta, where she worked for the Southern Regional Council, helped to lead an oral history project at the Institute for Southern Studies, and was involved in the women's liberation movement. In 1973, she became a tenure track instructor in the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and founding director of UNC's Southern Oral History Program.
In 1989, Hall was named Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During her time at UNC, she served as advisor and mentor to many graduate students, a number of whom went on to distinguished scholarly careers and to leadership positions in oral history and public history endeavors. She served as director of the Southern Oral History Program until 2011. During her tenure, the SOHP collected over 5000 interviews on the history of the American South, covering topics such as industrialization, the long civil rights movement, women's history, and Southern politics. She also served as Mark W. Clark Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at The Citadel, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, director of the Duke University–University of North Carolina Center for Research on Women, and Ford Foundation Professor at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.
Over the course of her career, Hall has been elected president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association and founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association. She was elected to the Society of American Historians in 1990 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.
She retired in 2014 and resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Personal life

From 1970 to 1982, she was married to Bob Hall, who went on to be an organizer, investigative reporter, and long-time head of the Institute for Southern Studies and executive director of Democracy NC. In May 2013, Hall and her husband Robert Korstad, a professor of history and public policy at Duke University, whom she married in 1995, were among the second group of protestors to be arrested in North Carolina's Moral Monday protests against measures taken by then-Governor Pat McCrory and the Republican-controlled North Carolina General Assembly. They were also among the founders of Scholars for North Carolina's Future.

Fellowships

Hall has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study, the Wilson Center, and the National Humanities Center.

Awards

Legacy

  • Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Prize, Southern Association of Women Historians, 1994–present
  • Jacquelyn Hall Summer Research Fellowship, Southern Oral History Program, UNC, endowed 2017, awarded annually

Works

Books:
  • Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America
  • Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching
Collaborative Books:
  • Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World
Edited Works:
Selected Articles in Scholarly Journals:
  • “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 : 1233–263. Reprinted in Best Articles in American History, 2007, ed. Jacqueline Jones.
  • “Women Writers, the ‘Southern Front,’ and the Dialectical Imagination,” Journal of Southern History 69 : 3-38.
  • “Last Words,” contribution to Round Table on Self and Subject, Journal of American History 89 : 30–36.
  • “‘To Widen the Reach of Our Love’: Autobiography, History, and Desire,” Feminist Studies 26 : 231–47.
  • “‘You Must Remember This’: Autobiography as Social Critique,” Journal of American History 85 : 439–65. Reprinted in The New South: New Histories, ed. J. William Harris,.
  • “Open Secrets: Memory, Imagination, and the Refashioning of Southern Identity,” American Quarterly 50 : 110–24. Reprinted in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader, ed. Ellen Dubois and Vicki Ruiz.
  • “A Later Comment”; contribution to “What We See and Can’t See in the Past: A Round Table,” Journal of American History 83 : 1268–70.
  • “Broadus Mitchell,” Radical History Review 45 : 31–38. Reprinted as “Broadus Mitchell: Economic Historian of the South,” Reading Southern History: Essays on Interpreters and Interpretations, ed. Glenn Feldman, 25–31.
  • “Partial Truths,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 : 900–911.
  • “Cotton Mill People: Work, Community and Protest in the Textile South, 1880–1940,” American Historical Review 91 : 245–86. Coauthors Robert Korstad and James Leloudis. Reprinted in Major Problems in the History of the American South, ed. Paul D. Escott and David R. Goldfield ; Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, ed. Leon Fink.
  • “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” Journal of American History 73 : 354–82. Reprinted in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, ed. Linda K. Kerber and Jane DeHart Mathews ; Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader, ed. Ellen Dubois and Vicki Ruiz ; Gender in American History from 1890, ed. Barbara Melosh ; Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past, ed. Catherine Clinton ; Major Problems in American Women’s History, ed. Mary Beth Norton and Ruth M. Alexander.
  • “Second Thoughts: On Writing a Feminist Biography,” Feminist Studies 13 : 19–37.
  • Preface, “Women’s History Goes to Trial: EEOC v. Sears Roebuck and Company,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 11 : 751–53.
Book Chapters:
  • "How We Tell About the Civil Rights Movement and Why It Matters," NASA in the Long Civil Movement, ed. Brian C. Odom and Stephan P. Waring, ix-xiv.
  • "The Good Fight," Mothers and Strangers: Essays on Motherhood from the New South, ed. Samia Serageldin and Lee Smith, 120–26.
  • Die Lange Bürgerrechtsbewegung und die politisch Instrumentalisierung von Geschichte," Von Selma Bis Ferguson: Rasse un Rassismus in den USA, ed. Michael Butter, Astrid Fanke, and Hor st Tonn, 15-46.
  • “Case Study: The Southern Oral History Program,” The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, ed. Donald A. Ritchie, 409–16. Coauthor Kathryn Nasstrom.
  • “Reflections,” Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Race and Politics in the New South, ed. Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, 34–07.
  • “Afterward: Reverberations,” Remembering: Oral History Performance, ed. Della Pollock, 187–98.
  • “O. Delight Smith: A Labor Organizer’s Odyssey,” in Forgotten Heroes from America’s Past: Inspiring Portraits from Our Leading Historians, ed. Susan Ware, 185–93.
  • “O. Delight Smith’s Progressive Era: Labor, Feminism and Reform in the Urban South,” in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock, 166–98.
  • “Partial Truths,” in Southern Women: Histories and Identities, ed. Virginia Bernhard et al..
  • “Lives through Time: Second Thoughts on Jessie Daniel Ames,” The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women, ed. Sara Alpern et al..
  • “Private Eyes, Public Women: Class and Sex in the Urban South, Atlanta, 1913–1915,” in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron, 243–72. Reprinted in Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People, ed. Ardis Cameron.
  • “History, Story, and Performance: The Making and Remaking of a Southern Cotton Mill World,” in Reconstructing American Literary and Historical Studies, ed. Günter H. Lenz, Hartmut Keil, and Sabine Bröck-Sallah, 324–44. Coauthor Della Pollock.
  • "A Bond of Common Womanhood: Building an Interracial Community in the Jim Crow South," in Women, Families, and Communities: Readings in American History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt, 99–114.
  • “Women in the South,” in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham, ed. John B. Boles and Evelyn T. Nolen, 454–509. Coauthor Anne Firor Scott.
  • “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body’: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow et al, 328–49. Reprinted in Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins ; Southern Exposure, 12.
  • “‘A Truly Subversive Affair’: Women Against Lynching in the Twentieth-Century South,” in Women of America: A History, ed. Carol Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, 360–88.
;Publication Awards
  • Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America:
  • * PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, PEN America
  • * Summersell Prize, Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama
  • * Prose Award, the Association of American Publishers
  • * Sydnor Award, Southern Historical Association
  • * Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, Southern Association of Women Historians
  • * Willie Lee Rose Prize, Southern Association of Women Historians
  • * Bell Award, Georgia Historical Society ; Plutarch Award Finalist, Biographers International
  • The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past: Best Articles in American History, 2007, ed. Jacqueline Jones for the Organization of American Historian
  • ‘You Must Remember This,’': A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize, Southern Association of Women Historians
  • Like a Family:
  • * Albert J. Beveridge Award, American Historical Association
  • * Merle Curti Social History Award, Organization of American Historians, co-winner
  • * Philip Taft Labor History Prize, Cornell University, School of Industrial and Labor Relations
  • * John Hope Franklin Prize, Honorable Mention, American Studies Association
  • “Disorderly Women”:
  • * Annual Article Prize, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
  • * Binkley-Stephenson Award, Organization of American Historians
  • Revolt Against Chivalry:
  • * Francis B. Simkins Award, Southern Historical Association
  • * Lillian Smith Award, Southern Regional Council
  • * Bancroft Dissertation Award, Columbia University, 1974 best dissertation in history, diplomacy, or diplomatic affairs)