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 2022 annual meeting in Baltimore, MD for books published in 2022 and 2023. Entries should be submitted to the committee members at the addresses listed below before March 1, 2024.

2024 Award Committee

William Sturkey, University of Chapel Hill, Chair
UNC Wilmington, Morton 263 
601 S. College Road
Wilmington NC 28403

Michael Honey, University of Washington, Tocoma
Garretson Woodruff Pratt 422, 1900 Commerce Street
University of Washington, Tocoma
Tocoma, WA 98402

Rebecca Sharpless, Texas Christian University
Reed Hall 329
Texas Christian University
Fort Worth, TX 76132

Past Winners

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