One of the 10 winners of 2025 Whiting Nonfiction Grants for Works-in-Progress is Grace Elizabeth Hale, Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia and an expert on 20th-century America.
The grant provides $40,000 to support the completion of works, “which showcase the breadth of contemporary nonfiction, from memoir to scientific narrative to investigative journalism,” according to the Whiting Foundation’s announcement. Winners also receive publicity support and guidance.
UVA historian Grace Hale’s forthcoming book tells the story of a Kentucky coal miners’ strike and its long-term effects on the labor movement. (Contributed photo)
Hale’s forthcoming book, “They Don’t Own Us: Harlan County, Kentucky and the Past and Future of American Workers,” tells the story of working-class Americans navigating the economic, political and cultural changes scholars call “neoliberalism.”
In the late 1960s and ’70s, working people built a now mostly forgotten interracial movement to reform unions and empower American workers. During Harlan County’s Brookside coal strike, local women, working and disabled miners, and United Mine Workers of America officials joined forces to defeat Duke Power, a major power company.
The Brookside strike proved democratic reformers could run a union and use it to improve workers’ lives. The strike also enabled the rank-and-file takeover of the UMWA, which became the model for future union reform still used today.
The Whiting judges wrote: “‘They Don’t Own Us’ is a profound and layered consideration of how labor struggles in the 1960s and 1970s foreshadowed current American economic inequality, and Grace Elizabeth Hale is a writer and historian who captures grassroots labor’s fierceness and tenderness in equal measures. … Through immersive storytelling and meticulous research, Hale brings to life forgotten strategies of labor organizing and demonstrates their relevance today. This is a crucial work of history that revitalizes conversations around workers’ rights and will continue to instill its wisdom and inspiration in new generations of laborers fighting for dignity.”
What do a former dean and Lyle Lovett have in common?
Robert Pianta, a professor in the School of Education and Human Development, has been named among 11 new fellows of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study at Texas A&M University.
Robert Pianta, a professor and former dean of 鶹ƽ School of Education and Human Development, is headed to Texas A&M as a fellow of its Hagler Institute for Advanced Study. (UVA School of Education and Human Development photo)
Hagler Fellows are recognized for outstanding achievement in their fields. Each is a member of a national academy or equivalent organization. Previous classes of Hagler Fellows have included six Nobel laureates, two Wolf Prize recipients, a recipient of the Hubble Medal in Literature for Lifetime Achievement and a two-time recipient of the State Prize of Russia.
Besides Pianta, the newest class also includes four-time Grammy Award winner Lyle Lovett.
Fellows work closely with Texas A&M faculty and students during their appointments, which generally last up to one year.
Pianta, the Batten Bicentennial Professor of Early Childhood Education and former dean of the Education School, focuses his research on the intersection of education and human development, particularly teacher-student relationships. He will collaborate with faculty and students in Texas A&M’s College of Education and Human Development.
The institute will induct its Hagler Fellows for 2025-26 during its annual gala in February.
Publication names engineering historian a ‘mobility changemaker’
Peter Norton’s scholarship focuses on the history – and future – of the automobile. (UVA Engineering photo)
Zag Daily, an online publication focused on the business of sustainable transportation, recently named Peter Norton, an associate professor of history in the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Engineering and Society, to its second annual “Zag List” of “100 trailblazers driving the global shift toward cleaner, safer and more connected mobility worldwide.”
The publication about the 100th anniversary of Los Angeles’ traffic ordinance, recognized as one of the first to prioritize vehicles over pedestrians.
“(Norton’s) research continues to shape how we understand modern mobility and rethink who our streets are really for,” the publication wrote.
Norton has written about transportation history and policy, traffic safety and autonomous vehicles, including two books, “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City” and “Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving.” His article, “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street,” published in Technology and Culture, won the Abbott Payson Usher Prize of the Society for the History of Technology.
He is a member of 鶹ƽ Center for Transportation Studies and is a winner of the Hartfield-Jefferson Scholars Teaching Prize.
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