Ambrose Award Goes to Longtime Director of Southern Oral History Program
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall spent 40 years documenting the history of the American South, particularly the history of its African Americans, workers and women
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, founding director of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina and Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita of history, has been awarded the 2015 Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award by the Rutgers Living History Society.
Hall is a specialist in the history of the American South, particularly labor history and the history of southern women. She was president of the Organization of American Historians from 2003 to 2004 and founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association.
In 1999, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal for her efforts to deepen the nation’s understanding of and engagement with the humanities. She is the author of Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (Columbia University Press, 1979 and 1993) and co-author with James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones and Chris Daly of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (University of North Carolina Press, 1987 and 2000).
The Rutgers Living History Society comprises participants in the Rutgers Oral History Archives program. “By honoring me this way, the Rutgers Living History Society also honors the Southern Oral History Program, of which I’m immensely proud,” Hall said.
The Southern Oral History Program has gathered more than 5,300 oral histories over nearly four decades. The program covers topics ranging from business and labor history to the civil rights movement, the rise of conservatism, the industrialization of the south and the role of religion in the lives of southerners. Its histories, like those in the Rutgers Oral History Archives, are longitudinal. “We ask people to tell us their life stories,” Hall said. “Then, we listen.”
A native of Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, Hall was more interested in literature than history when she matriculated at Rhodes College – then called Southwestern at Memphis – in Memphis, Tennessee. But her history professor, John Hemphill, saw her as a historian and was not shy about telling her.
“He was one of those teachers who really singled people out and told them what they should do with their lives,” Hall recalls. “He would read something you’d written and say, ‘You’re good at this; you can do this.’ I went to Columbia for graduate school; other classmates in that tiny college went on to Princeton and Yale.”
It was as a graduate student, working on her dissertation and, with other former civil rights activists, using oral history to document a tradition of southern dissent, that she was offered the directorship of the fledgling Southern Oral History Program in 1973. Hall retired from the University of North Carolina last year and is finishing a visiting professorship at The Citadel, the state military college in Charleston, South Carolina. She is working on a book about two white southern sisters, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin and Grace Lumpkin, writers and social activists who wrote memoirs (Katherine) and novels (Grace) about the plight of African Americans and poor people in the South.
Past recipients of the Stephen E. Ambrose Award include presidential historian Michael Beschloss, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, broadcast journalist and author Tom Brokaw, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, military historian Rick Atkinson and Studs Terkel.
Media contact: Ken Branson 848-932-0580, cell 908-797-2590, kbranson@ucm.rutgers.edu