Past Taft Award Recipients
2007 Award Winner
The members of 2007 Taft Prize committee---Jefferson Cowie, Ileen DeVault (chair), Nancy Gabin, Joseph McCartin, and Stephen Pitti---are delighted to announce that this year's prize for the outstanding book published in 2006 in the field of U.S. labor history has been awarded to Nancy MacLean in recognition of her pathbreaking volume Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Russell Sage Foundation Books, Harvard University Press). MacLean's sweeping work maps out new terrain in the recent history of American workers, illuminating the achievements and limits of efforts to win equal opportunity, rights, and greater diversity in U.S. workplaces. The prodigious research, broad scope, and elegant style of this book ensured that it stood out from among a large group of unusually strong nominees this year, testifying both to the vitality of the field and to the singular importance of Nancy MacLean's contribution.
2006 Award Winner
The winner of the 2006 Philip Taft Labor History Award is James N. Gregory, for his beautifully written and prodigiously researched book, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Unlike previous authors who have focused exclusively on either white or black southerners’ migrations, Gregory describes how both came together in emptying the southern states of some twenty-nine million of its residents between 1900 and the end of the 1970s. Using an impressive range of sources, Gregory is always attentive to both the similarities and the differences between the two racial migrations, demonstrating the various factors shaping southerners’ decisions to leave the south, the reactions of northerners to their presence, and the ways in which southerners would permanently alter northern culture, religion, politics, and workplaces. Casting his subjects as agents of change, Gregory significantly revises twentieth century American social and labor history and reshapes what we know and how we think about the politics of race and class.
2005 Award Winner
The 2005 Philip Taft Labor History Book Prize was awarded to Dorothy Sue Cobble for her outstanding examination of workplace feminism The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004). The selection committee was privileged to deal with an impressive set of books that were wide-ranging in their topics, methodologies, and contributions to the field. Cobble's study stood out because of her challenge to our understanding of labor history, women’s history, and political history in the twentieth century. She not only helps to recast our view of labor history by integrating women and the politics of gender into its modern story, but also reframes some of the central dilemmas of feminism by revealing the more inclusive social vision that often clashed with the individual rights of "second wave" feminism.
While partially synthetic, The Other Women's Movement is based on extensive original research in union, government, and policy makers’ records. It is a well-crafted piece of history, written in a graceful, readable style.
Frank Tobias Higbie's book, Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers & Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930 (University of Illinois Press), is an imaginative recreation of the diverse people, mostly younger men, who formed an ever-shifting transient labor force between the late 19th century and the Great Depression. Higbie's clear and lucid book is a deft interplay of social history, labor studies, cultural studies, and ethnography.
In Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers & the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press), Robert Rodgers Korstad recounts the story of tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, during the 1940s and 50s in a work which is beautifully written and conceived, deeply researched, and ambitious in scope. In telling the story of black and white workers, both male and female, coming together in support of industrial unionism, Korstad weaves together union organizing and Cold War politics in a compelling way.
2003
Nelson Lichtenstein
State of the Union: A Century of American Labor
2002
Alice Kessler-Harris
In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America
2001
Gunther Peck
Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930
2000
Jefferson Cowie
Capital Moves: RCA’s 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor
1999
Joseph A. McCartin
Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy & the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921
1997
Sanford M. Jacoby
Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal
1996
Thomas Sugrue
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race & Inequality in Postwar Detroit
1995
Robert Zieger
The CIO
1994
Eileen Boris
Home to Work: Motherhood & the Politics of Industrial Homework in the U.S.
1993
Peter Way
Common Labour: Workers & the Digging of North American Canals, 1780-1860
1992
Douglass Flamming
Creating the Modern South: Millhands & Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884-1984
1991
Steven Fraser
Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman & the Rise of American Labor
1990
Lizabeth Cohen
Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939
1989
Joshua Freeman
In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966
1989
Philip Scranton
Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets, & Power in Philadelphia Textiles, 1885-1941
1988
Alan Derickson
Workers’ Health, Workers’ Democracy: The Western Miners Struggle, 1891-1925
1987
Jacquelyn Dowd, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, & Christopher B. Day
Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton
1986
Alexander Keyssar
Out of Work : The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts
1985
Jacqueline Jones
Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present
1984
Paul Avrich
The Haymarket Tragedy
1984
Robert Zieger
Rebuilding the Pulp & Paper Workers’ Union, 1933-1941
1983
Walter Licht
Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century
1982
Howell John Harris
The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s
1982
Alice Kessler-Harris
Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States
1981
James A. Gross
The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937-1947
1980
No award made
1979
August Meier & Elliott Rudwick
Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW
1978
David M. Katzman
Seven Days a Week: Women & Domestic Service in Industrializing America
