Craig Heron has now won four awards for his 2015 book Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remaking the Workers’ City. Three came in the last two weeks.
The Canadian Historical Association awarded him the Clio Prize for Ontario, the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies gave him the 2015 Book of the Year award, and the Ontario Historical Society gave him the Fred Landon Award for local and regional history.
These follow the designation of Book of the Year by the International Labor History Association. He was also shortlisted for the Ontario Speaker’s Book Award and the Canadian Historical Association’s Sir John A. Macdonald Prize.
The citation from the Clio Prize read:
“Lunch Bucket Lives is not only an impressive condensation of the last half century of social history, but a deeply respectful examination of the complex lives of Hamiltonians as the city became Steeltown. Heron’s unassailable command of both the primary and secondary literature permits a richly detailed discussion of working class lives on the job, at home, and in the community. In demonstrating how intersections of race, class, gender and ethnicity informed, nurtured, but also limited the responses of workers to the emergence of industrial capitalism, Lunch Bucket Lives attains an interpretive complexity that will challenge those familiar with its subject, period, and place. All in all, Lunch Bucket Lives is a study that equals the “Ambitious City” it seeks to document.”
The citation from the Landon Prize read:
“Craig Heron’s Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remaking the Workers’ City is a highly creative, meticulously researched study of the working-class people of Hamilton, Ontario from the 1890s to the 1930s. The product of nearly forty years of scholarly research and thought, Heron’s study effectively integrates enormous interdisciplinary bodies of knowledge. Lunch-Bucket Lives is exhaustively researched and documented, using a broad range of primary and secondary sources. It employs Hamiltonians as a means to investigate the intersections of class, gender, ethnicity, and race, all the while highlighting what can be accomplished in the artful blending of community study and total history. The result is a thoroughly engaging history of Hamilton (and region) during this period that effortlessly advances its arguments as it relates individual and collective experiences in the factory, on the city’s streets, and in the workers’ homes. Undoubtedly, Lunch-Bucket Lives will prove a model as much for historians engaged in labour history as it will for those conducting community or local history.”