Professor of History Annelise Orleck has been elected to the Society of American Historians. Founded in 1939, the society recognizes literary distinction in history and biography across books, essays, film, drama, and other emerging forms of public communication.
Based at Columbia University, the society’s roughly 450 members include academic scholars, public historians, and professional writers in American history. Orleck is one of 20 writers and scholars elected to the 2026 class. At Dartmouth, she joins three history colleagues in the society: Colin Calloway, the John Kimball Jr. 1943 Professor of History; Matthew Delmont, the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History; and Matthew Garcia, the Ralph and Richard Lazarus Professor of History.
“I appreciate being elected to the Society of American Historians because SAH honors the kind of work that I have tried to do throughout my career,” Orleck says. “I have long admired scholars who write history as literature—full of human dramas, aspirations and struggles for justice—and who see history as a field of knowledge that matters far beyond the bounds of academe. Because I research and write about people who have received too little attention from scholars —labor and immigrant activists, poor moms seeking welfare rights, and low-wage workers fighting for a living wage and dignified working conditions—it has always been important to me to write in prose that can be read and enjoyed not just by scholars and students but also by those whose lives and work I chronicle.”
In its citation, the society praised Orleck’s “compelling lucidity and narrative power.” Her 2005 book Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty shows that strength. It tells the story of Ruby Duncan and a group of low-income Black mothers who, in March 1971, led roughly 1,000 protesters into Caesars Palace and shut down the gambling floor to protest deep welfare cuts in one of the richest states in the country. Nearly two decades after its publication, the book became a PBS documentary.
Orleck has written about American women, labor, immigration, and radical politics. Her other books include Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, The Soviet Jewish Americans, Rethinking American Women’s Activism, and We Are All Fast Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages, along with co-edited volumes on motherhood across the political spectrum and on the grassroots history of the War on Poverty.
“It is a fitting honor for Annelise, whose work has spanned many different aspects of American and global labor history,” says Darrin McMahon, the David W. Little Class of 1944 Professor of History and chair of the department. “But the through-line is her sensitivity to the plight of the marginalized and the exploited and her solidarity with them in the pursuit of justice. She’s known to many around the world as a fearless fighter in this regard, but here in the history department, students and colleagues think of her first and foremost as a beloved teacher and colleague. I’m pretty certain that Annelise has advised more history honors theses than anyone in the department’s history, and that may be true of the College in all fields. But perhaps her greatest gift is to the many many students whose horizons she has broadened and lives she has enriched.”
The society awards two of the field’s notable honors: the Francis Parkman Prize for the best book in American history and the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation. Both carry a recent Dartmouth connection. Bench Ansfield, a former postdoctoral fellow in Dartmouth’s Society of Fellows, won the Nevins Prize in 2022 for their dissertation and the 2026 Parkman Prize for the book that grew out of it, Born in Flames, becoming only the second historian to win both for the same work.
Orleck is at work on two more books: a study of Filipina overseas domestic workers organizing a global union, and a historical novel set in New York City and rooted in family stories. Both, she says, will “center the kinds of fresh and rarely heard voices that have always been at the heart of my writing.”