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6 books match the query 'Montgomery, David W.'

cover of A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance

A David Montgomery Reader

Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance

David Montgomery. Edited by Shelton Stromquist and James R. Barrett

University of Illinois Press, 2024

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 This collection of Montgomery’s most important published and unpublished articles and essays draws from the historian’s entire five-decade career.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.

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cover of Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872

Beyond Equality

Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872

David Montgomery

University of Illinois Press, 1981

"For anyone who believes that there was no important labor movement before Roosevelt, or before Gompers, or before the Knights of Labor, this well-documented work should prove a shocker. And for those who look to the past for enlightenment to guide us through our troubled tomorrows, this book is a reservoir of historic information and insights." -- New Leader
"Beyond Equality is a masterpiece. . . . A book of bold and brilliant originality, it is now shaping the perspective of a new generation of graduate students." -- David Brion Davis, author of The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
 
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cover of Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham

Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham

Edited by Horace Huntley and David Montgomery

University of Illinois Press, 2004

Horace Huntley and David Montgomery curate a collection of annotated oral interviews of black workers who served on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama. As the interviewees recount their struggles against discrimination, they show how collective action--whether through unions, the Movement, or networks of workplace activists--sought to gain access to better jobs, municipal services, housing, and less restrictive voter registration. 

Powerful and honest, Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham draws on work by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to offer readers vivid eyewitness accounts of American history in the making.

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cover of Civic Labors: Scholar Activism and Working-Class Studies

Civic Labors

Scholar Activism and Working-Class Studies

Edited by Dennis Deslippe, Eric Fure-Slocum, and John W. McKerley

University of Illinois Press, 2016

Labor studies scholars and working-class historians have long worked at the crossroads of academia and activism. The essays in this collection examine the challenges and opportunities for engaged scholarship in the United States and abroad. A diverse roster of contributors discuss how participation in current labor and social struggles guides their campus and community organizing, public history initiatives, teaching, mentoring, and other activities. They also explore the role of research and scholarship in social change, while acknowledging that intellectual labor complements but never replaces collective action and movement building. Contributors: Kristen Anderson, Daniel E. Atkinson, James R. Barrett, Susan Roth Breitzer, Susan Chandler, Sam Davies, Dennis Deslippe, Eric Fure-Slocum, Colin Gordon, Michael Innis-Jiménez, Stephanie Luce, Joseph A. McCartin, John W. McKerley, Matthew M. Mettler, Stephen Meyer, David Montgomery, Kim E. Nielsen, Peter Rachleff, Ralph Scharnau, Jennifer Sherer, Shelton Stromquist, Emily E. LB. Twarog, and John Williams-Searle.
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cover of Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises

Workers in Hard Times

A Long View of Economic Crises

Edited by Leon Fink, Joseph A. McCartin, and Joan Sangster

University of Illinois Press, 2020

Seeking to historicize the 2007-2009 Great Recession, this volume of essays situates the current economic crisis and its impact on workers in the context of previous abrupt shifts in the modern-day capitalist marketplace. Contributors use examples from industrialized North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia to demonstrate how workers and states have responded to those shifts and to their disempowering effects on labor.

Since the Industrial Revolution, contributors argue, factors such as race, sex, and state intervention have mediated both the effect of economic depressions on workers' lives and workers' responses to those depressions. Contributors also posit a varying dynamic between political upheaval and economic crises, and between workers and the welfare state.

The volume ends with an examination of today's "Great Recession": its historical distinctiveness, its connection to neoliberalism, and its attendant expressions of worker status and agency around the world. A sobering conclusion lays out a likely future for workers--one not far removed from the instability and privation of the nineteenth century.

The essays in this volume offer up no easy solutions to the challenges facing today's workers. Nevertheless, they make clear that cogent historical thinking is crucial to understanding those challenges, and they push us toward a rethinking of the relationship between capital and labor, the waged and unwaged, and the employed and jobless.

Contributors are Sven Beckert, Sean Cadigan, Leon Fink, Alvin Finkel, Wendy Goldman, Gaetan Heroux, Joseph A. McCartin, David Montgomery, Edward Montgomery, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Melanie Nolan, Bryan D. Palmer, Joan Sangster, Judith Stein, Hilary Wainright, and Lu Zhang.

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cover of Working for Democracy: American Workers from the Revolution to the Present

Working for Democracy

American Workers from the Revolution to the Present

Edited by Paul Buhle and Alan Dawley

University of Illinois Press, 1985

Written by some of our nation's top historians, Working for Democracy is the first book to examine the politics of American workers from the revolution to the present in terms of broad struggles for power in society at large. In more than a dozen chapters, the topics range from the committees of artisan "republicans" at the time of the American Revolution to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Whether the subject is the anti-slavery movement, the New Deal coalition, the Wobblies, or women workers, Working For Democracy is a testament to the struggles of workers everywhere in America.
 
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