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The 2024 Pulitzer Prize Winner in History
For a distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era , by Jacqueline Jones (Basic Books)

A breathtakingly original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston that profoundly reshapes our understanding of the city’s abolitionist legacy and the challenging reality for its Black residents.

Jacqueline Jones accepts the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for History from Columbia University Interim President Katrina Armstrong. (David Dini/The Pulitzer Prizes)

Winning Work

No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era

By

Jacqueline Jones

From a Bancroft Prize winner, a harrowing portrait of Black workers and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston  
 
Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, however, the city was far from a beacon of equality. 
 
In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small: a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Before, during, and after the Civil War, white abolitionists and Republicans refused to secure equal employment opportunity for Black Bostonians, condemning most of them to poverty. Still, Jones finds, some Black entrepreneurs ingeniously created their own jobs and forged their own career paths. 
 
Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all.

Biography

Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women’s History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin and the past president of the American Historical Association. Winner of the Bancroft Prize for  Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow and a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, she lives in Concord, Massachusetts. 

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in History in 2024:

Elliott West

A masterly crafted and comprehensive narrative of how our nation’s history unfolded across the American West and how the West, no less than the Civil War, profoundly shaped the rise of modern America.

Michael Willrich

A riveting and beautifully written story of how anarchists and their lawyers remade American law, with profound implications for modern jurisprudence, and prompting serious reflection on the meaning and limits of democracy.

The Jury

Tiya Miles(Chair)

Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor, Harvard University

Jack E. Davis*

Professor of History and Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities, University of Florida

Eric Foner*

DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University

Natalia Molina

Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity; Dean's Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California

Louis Warren

W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of U.S. Western History, University of California, Davis

Winners in History

2023

Jefferson Cowie

A resonant account of an Alabama county in the 19th and 20th centuries shaped by settler colonialism and slavery, a portrait that illustrates the evolution of white supremacy by drawing powerful connections between anti-government and racist ideologies.
2022

Ada Ferrer

An original and compelling history, spanning five centuries, of the island that became an obsession for many presidents and policy makers, transforming how we think about the U.S. in Latin America, and Cuba in American society.
2021

Marcia Chatelain

A nuanced account of the complicated role the fast-food industry plays in African-American communities, a portrait of race and capitalism that masterfully illustrates how the fight for civil rights has been intertwined with the fate of Black businesses.
2020

W. Caleb McDaniel

A masterfully researched meditation on reparations based on the remarkable story of a 19th century woman who survived kidnapping and re-enslavement to sue her captor.
See All History

2024 Prize Winners

National Reporting

Staff of Reuters

For an eye-opening series of accountability stories focused on Elon Musk’s automobile and aerospace businesses, stories that displayed remarkable breadth and depth and provoked official probes of his companies’ practices in Europe and the United States.
See All 2024 Winners