H. L. Mitchell Award

Award Description

The H. L. Mitchell Award is given in recognition of a distinguished book concerning the history of the southern working class, including but not limited to industrial laborers and/or small farmers and agricultural laborers. Awarded in even-numbered years for a book published during the preceding two years, it will next be awarded at the 2024 annual meeting in Atlanta GA for books published in 2024 or 2025. Entries should be submitted to the committee members at the addresses listed below before March 1, 2026.

2026 Award Committee

Cindy Hahamovitch, University of Georgia, Chair
250 Baldwin Street, LeConte Hall
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602

Jessica Wilkerson, West Virginia University
314 Chitwood Hall
West Virginia University
Morgantown, West Virginia 26506

Michael D. Thompson, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
307 Patten House
University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
Chattanooga, TN 37403

Past Winners

2024 - Sarah McNamara
Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, University of North Carolina Press, 2023

2022 - Robert Chase
We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America, University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

2020 - Jessica Wilkerson
To Live Here You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice, University of Illinois Press, 2019.

2016 - Michelle Haberland
Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South, 1930-2000, University of Georgia Press, 2015.

2014 - Adrienne Montieth Petty
Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War, Oxford University Press, 2013.

2012 - Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll
The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America, University of Illinois Press, 2011.

2010 - Seth Rockman
Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009

2008 - Michael K. Honey
Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike: Martin Luther King's Last Champaign, W. W. Norton & Co., 2007

2006 - William P. Jones
The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South, University of Illinois Press, 2005

2004 - Robert Korstad
Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South, University of North Carolina Press, 2003

2002 - Brian Kelly
Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921, University of Illinois Press, 2001

2000 - Michael Honey
Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle, University of California Press, 1999

1998 - Tera W. Hunter
To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Harvard University Press, 1997

1996 - No award given.

1994 - Emilio Zamora
The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas, Texas A&M University Press, 1993