Philip Taft Labor History Book Award

The Philip Taft Labor History Award competition is open to any book or books published in the 2026 calendar year relating to the history of American Labor. 

The committee defines "labor history" in a broad sense to include the history of workers (free and unfree, organized and unorganized), their institutions, and their workplaces, as well as the broader historical trends that have shaped working-class life, including but not limited to: immigration, slavery, community, the state, race, gender, and ethnicity.

A hard copy of each nominated book should be sent directly to each member of the Award Committee at the address listed in the Submission Guidelines. The Award is offered by the ILR School at Cornell University, in cooperation with the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA).

Please nominate books no later than December 15, 2026.   We will accept page proofs for books published during the last two weeks of December. Please check the Submission Guidelines for full nomination information.  The winner of this year's prize will be announced at the 2027 LAWCHA annual meeting.

The winner of the 2026 Prize is Marla A. Ramirez’s book, Banished Citizens:  A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation, published by Harvard University Press.  Marla A. Ramírez highlights four individual women and their families to personalize different periods of “repatriation”—or banishment, as Ramirez argues it should be called—building each microhistory from unique readings of oral histories, family records, and state-produced archival materials.  She does an excellent job at connecting each wave of banished Mexican Americans between 1921 and 1944 with economic demands for their work in the U.S.   Her sustained binational focus brings to light the interplay between anti-Mexican nativism in the US and the Mexican state's ambiguous relationship to and treatment of the banished.  Ramirez's depiction of the long-term costs of banishment and the dehumanization that drives it provides a stark depiction of the consequences of racist gatekeeping. 

Sincerely,

Ileen A. DeVault
Chair, Philip Taft Labor History Award Committee