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 This collection of Montgomery's most important published and unpublished articles and essays draws from the historian's entire five-decade career.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

Biographical Sketch

Introduction

Part I. Writing the People's History

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

Part II. Working-Class Formation

The Working Classes of the Pre-Industrial American City, 1780-1830

Social Attitudes of American Workers in the 1840s

The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in the Kensington Riots of 1844

Wage Labor, Bondage, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America

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

Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America

Labor and the Republic in Industrial America, 1860-1920

Racism, Immigrants, and Political Reform

Part IV. Toward a History of Workers' Control

Trade Union Practice and the Origins of Syndicalist Theory in the United States

Workers' Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century

The "New Unionism" and the Transformation of Workers' Consciousness in America, 1909-22

Part V. After The Fall

Thinking about American Workers in the 1920s

Labor and the Political Leadership of New Deal America

Working People's Response to Past Depressions

Part VI. The Move to Global and Comparative Study

Empire, Race, and Working-Class Mobilizations

Workers' Movements in the United States Confront Imperialism: The Progressive Era Experience

Part VII. Political Interventions

What's Happening to the American Worker?

Foreword to On Strike for Respect

Yesterday's Wisdom: Changing Situations and New Initiatives in the American Labor Movement

Challenges Facing Historians of the Working Class

A David Montgomery Bibliography

Index

|"In this invaluable sample of nearly forty years of working-class social history, A David Montgomery Readerreminds us of the special gifts—the confidence of purpose, analytical range, and sheer breadth of knowledge—regularly exhibited by this master craftsman at work."—Leon Fink, Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II
|David Montgomery (1927–2011) was the Farnam Professor of History at Yale University. His books include The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925. Shelton Stromquist is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Iowa. He...