YEAR: 2019

Lu Ann Jones is a historian in the Park History Program of the National Park Service in Washington, DC. Duties include managing oral history research and training. An alumnus of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Lu Ann has worked as a historian in a variety of settings during the past 35 years. Between 1986 and 1991 she directed “An Oral History of Southern Agriculture” at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. She was associate professor at the University of South Florida and East Carolina University between 1996 and 2009. She has served as a scholar on a number of community-based history projects sponsored by the North Carolina Humanities Council.

Lu Ann is the author of Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South (UNC Press, 2002); and the co-author of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (UNC Press, 1987 and 2000); The Life and Legacy of Robert Smalls of South Carolina’s Sea Islands (Eastern National, 2012); and “‘Everyone Helped Their Neighbor’: Memories of Nags Head Woods (The Nature Conservancy, 1987; UNC Press, 2018). In addition to her Park Service work, she continues to conduct research for an ongoing project, “DuPont Comes to Tobacco Road: Rural Industrialization in the Postwar South,” for which she received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hagley Museum and Library, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Lu Ann was elected to the executive board of the Organization of American Historians in 2017, and she also serves as an adviser to the Drs. John S. and Betty J. Schuchman Deaf Documentary Center and the DC Oral History Collaborative. She has also served on the boards of OHMAR, the Society for History in the Federal Government, and the Oral History Association.