Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
AUTHOR

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Biographies & Memoirs
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Jacquelyn Dowd Hall grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, where the South meets the West. In college in Memphis and then graduate school in New York, she came of age with the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s. She has been—at some level—thinking about the women or at least the kinds of women who populate Sisters and Rebels for most of her writing and teaching career. She stumbled on Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin's autobiography while writing her first book. As founding director of the University of North Carolina's Southern Oral History Program, she learned that Katharine was only one of three fascinating sisters, each of whom grappled with a family legacy of slaveholding in which devotion to white supremacy and veneration of the Confederacy went hand in hand. The eldest, a true believer, had died ten years before. But Katharine and Grace, who, in her day, had been a celebrated radical novelist, were very much alive. Hall sought them out for interviews which, decades later, became the seeds of her new book. Hall is currently 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. She is the author or coauthor of prizewinning books and articles, including Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (1979); Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987); 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 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. Her most recent publication is “The Good Fight,” in Mothers and Strangers: Essays on Motherhood from the New South, ed. Samia Serageldin and Lee Smith (forthcoming, UNC Press, April 2019).
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