A foundational figure in modern labor history, David Montgomery both redefined and reoriented the field. This collection of Montgomery’s most important published and unpublished articles and essays draws from the historian’s entire five-decade career.

Taken together, the writings trace the development of Montgomery’s distinct voice and approach while providing a crucial window into an era that changed the ways scholars and the public understood working people’s place in American history. Three overarching themes and methods emerge from these essays: that class provided a rich reservoir of ideas and strategies for workers to build movements aimed at claiming their democratic rights; that capital endured with the power to manage the contours of economic life and the capacities of the state but that workers repeatedly and creatively mounted challenges to the terms of life and work dictated by capital; and that Montgomery’s method grounded his gritty empiricism and the conceptual richness of his analysis in the intimate social relations of production and of community, neighborhood, and family life.

Acknowledgments

Biographical Sketch

Introduction

Part I. Writing the People’s History

1. The Great Northern Strike of 1894: When Gene Debs Beat Jim Hill

Part II. Working-Class Formation

1. The Working Classes of the Pre-Industrial American City, 1780-1830
2. Social Attitudes of American Workers in the 1840s
3. The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in the Kensington Riots of 1844
4. Wage Labor, Bondage, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America

Part III. Mutualism and Contention: Strikes, Immigrants, and Working-Class Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century

1. Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America
2. Labor and the Republic in Industrial America, 1860-1920
3. Racism, Immigrants, and Political Reform

Part IV. Toward a History of Workers’ Control

1. Trade Union Practice and the Origins of Syndicalist Theory in the United States
2. Workers’ Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century
3. The “New Unionism” and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America, 1909-22

Part V. After The Fall

1. Thinking about American Workers in the 1920s
2. Labor and the Political Leadership of New Deal America
3. Working People’s Response to Past Depressions

Part VI. The Move to Global and Comparative Study

1. Empire, Race, and Working-Class Mobilizations
2. Workers’ Movements in the United States Confront Imperialism: The Progressive Era Experience

Part VII. Political Interventions

1. What’s Happening to the American Worker?
2. Foreword to On Strike for Respect
3. Yesterday’s Wisdom: Changing Situations and New Initiatives in the American Labor Movement
4. Challenges Facing Historians of the Working Class

A David Montgomery Bibliography

Index