William Jones
Associate Professor

Email: wjones3@wisc.edu
Phone: (608)263-1784
Office: 5123 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 5006 Mosse Humanities

Website: The Tribe of Black Ulysses (book)

Curriculum Vitae: View PDF

Office Hours: TBA

Education: PhD: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; MA: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; BA: Northwestern University

Bio Sketch:

I am a historian of the 20th Century United States, with a particular interest in race, class and work. I wrote my first book on African American industrial workers in the early-20th Century South and am currently researching a book on race in the service sector after World War II.

Research Interests:

Social and Political, 20th Century US, Labor and Working Class, African American.

Selected Publications:

• The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005) .
  • H.L. Mitchell Award, Southern Historical Association, 2006
  • Wentworth Illinois History Book Award, 2005
• “Working Class Hero:  The Forgotten Labor Roots of the Martin Luther King Holiday,” The Nation (January 30, 2006): 23-24
• “The Legacy of Failure: Why the Solid South Has Proved So Hard to Crack,” New Labor Forum (Fall, 2006): 32-39
• “‘Simple Truths of Democracy’: African Americans and Organized Labor in the Post-World War II South,” in Eric Arnesen, ed., The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights Since Emancipation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007)
• “Black Milwaukee, Proletarianization, and the Making of Black Working-Class History,” Journal of Urban History 33 (May 2007)

Awards:

• American Council of Learned Societies, Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, 2007-2008
• Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NEH/Newhouse Fellowship, 2005-2006
• Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for Minorities, 1999
• Frank Porter Graham Honor Society,UNC-Chapel Hill, 1998
• Smithsonian Graduate Student Fellowship, National Museum of American History, 1997

Courses Taught:

Lecture Courses:

• History 398 - The United States Since 1945 - Syllabus 2011 (pdf)
• History 102 - The United States Since 1865

Undergraduate Seminars:

• History 600 - Advanced Seminar in History - Topics: "Long Civil Rights Movement" - Syllabus 2009 (pdf)

Graduate Seminars:

• History 929 - Labor and Working Class History in the United States - Syllabus 2009 (pdf)