Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University and Jacqueline Jones of Wellesley College on April 3 were awarded the 1986 Bancroft Prizes in American history in ceremonies at Columbia University.
Kenneth Jackson won the award for his book Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, published by Oxford University Press, and Jacqueline Jones for her book Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, published by Basic Books. Each winner received $4,000.
Columbia President Michael I. Sovern presented the awards at a formal dinner sponsored by the Friends of the Columbia Libraries in the rotunda of Low Memorial Library on the university’s Morningside Heights campus.
Jackson, forty-six, is director of graduate studies in history and professor of history at Columbia, where he has been a faculty member since 1968. A native of Memphis, he received the BA, magna cum laude, from Memphis State University in 1961 and the MA and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago in 1963 and 1966, respectively.
A member of the editorial boards of a number of distinguished professional journals, Kenneth Jackson is the general editor of the Columbia History of Urban Life and the project director and editor in-chief of The New York Encyclopedia, a joint venture of Columbia and Yale Universities. He is the author of numerous articles, essays, and books. Crabgrass Frontier was a selection of the History Book Club and the subject of special sessions at the American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting in 1985.
He has won several competitive awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, two Woodrow Wilson Fellowships, and two National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowships. He has lectured at more than sixty colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia and has appeared on network television more than a dozen times as a specialist in urban affairs. He is a member of the American Historical Association and was elected a fellow of the Society of American Historians in 1970.
