March 1, 2000

BIRMINGHAM, AL — UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) historian Colin Davis, Ph.D., has won a $30,000, one-year fellowship grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Davis received one of 86 fellowships awarded by NEH out of 714 applications. He is the first UAB faculty member in the UAB School of Social and Behavioral Sciences to receive this honor.

Davis will use the grant to write a comparative history of the post-World War II longshoremen labor strikes in New York City and London. Although the labor strikes in the respective cities were unrelated and sparked by different factors, both strikes led to increased labor alienation from union leadership and a rise in new union leaders, many of whom had communist sympathies, said Davis.

Davis is an associate professor of labor history and recently published his latest book about the United Mine Workers union in Alabama, It Is Union and Liberty: Alabama Coal Miners and the UMW (1999, University of Alabama Press), which he co-authored with UAB labor historian Edwin Brown. Davis has taught at UAB since 1991.

The NEH is an independent federal agency that funds humanities programs and scholars in the United States.