² Interview with Montgomery, David in Visions of History, ed. MARHO (New York, 1984), 170 [hereafter “Montgomery interview”]Google Scholar.

³ Montgomery interview, 170–71.

⁴ Montgomery interview, 174.

⁵ Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York, 1987), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Ibid., 7–8.

⁷ Montgomery, David, “Class, Capitalism, and Contentment,” 125–26, in “A Symposium on The Fall of the House of Labor, Labor History 30 (Winter 1989): 93–137Google Scholar.

⁸ Ibid., 126–27.

⁹ Ibid., 129–30.

¹⁰ Ibid., 131, 134.

¹¹ Montgomery, David, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York, 1967), vii–xGoogle Scholar.

¹² Ibid., x.

¹³ In Beyond Equality, Montgomery revealed places such as Fall River, New Bedford, Chicago, and Brooklyn as crucibles for the struggle for the eight-hour day. Likewise, in his workers' control studies, locals of skilled workers in iron and steel in Homestead, Pittsburgh, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Columbus, Ohio, provided the models for rule-based workers' control. In The Fall of the House of Labor, he examined laborers in New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco and “operatives” in Chicago, Pullman, Haverhill. Fall River, and Lawrence. Montgomery's ability to range across so many places influenced a generation of historians of the working class to undertake local studies that carried national implications. This analytically broad approach to local or regional studies remained apparent in the work of students such as James Barrett, Peter Rachleff, Bruce Laurie, John Bennett, and Peter Gottlieb.

¹⁴ An abundance of evidence suggests how important and largely unacknowledged was shop floor militancy in the 1950s. See, for example, Weir, Stan, Singlejack Solidarity (Minneapolis, 2004)Google Scholar; and Glaberman, Martin, Punching Out and Other Writings, ed. Lynd, Staughton (Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar. Also, Aronowitz, Stanley, False Promises: The Shaping of Working-Class Consciousness (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Alice and Lynd, Staughton, Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers (Boston, 1973)Google Scholar; and oral histories such as “The World of the Shopfloor in the 1950s” in Solidarity and Survival: An Oral History of Iowa Labor in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stromquist, Shelton (Iowa City, 1993), 187–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Montgomery interview, 174–77.

¹⁶ Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 13.

¹⁷ Montgomery, David, “Workers' Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century” in Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York, 1979), 12Google Scholar. Montgomery originally published this article in Labor History 17 (Fall 1976): 485–509Google Scholar.

¹⁸ David Montgomery, “Trade Union Practice and the Origins of Syndicalist Theory in the United States,” unpublished paper [c. 1972], in the author's possession.

¹⁹ Montgomery interview, 177, 179.

²⁰ Montgomery, “Trade Union Practice and the Origins of Syndicalist Theory,” 3, 7, 19, 25.

²¹ Ibid., 6, 13.

²² Montgomery, “Workers' Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century,” and Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor.

²³ Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 70–71. He drew inspiration from the pathbreaking essay by Thistlethwaite, Frank, “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” XI. Congrès international des sciences historiques. Rapports (Stockholm, 1960)Google Scholar, 5:32–60. Thistlewaite's essay also became a staple of his graduate seminars and a foil to the theoretical literature on “modernization.” Like E. P. Thompson, Montgomery targeted those iterations of modernization theory in which class conflict would resolve in progressive, formulaic stages. This shared critique of modernization theory led to an incident that people at the University of Pittsburgh remembered for decades. Thompson spent a semester in residence in 1975. After his departure, Julius Rubin, one of the Pitt department's most zealous modernization theorists, circulated a critique of Thompson's essay, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd,” which itself attacks the assumption that modernity was necessary to generate values and customs that enabled working people to mobilize in their interests. Seeing a copy of this well after his departure, Thompson wrote and circulated a devastating and biting seventy-page critique of Rubin's use of modernization that the English scholar titled “Don't Tread on Me.”

²⁴ Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 327–28.

²⁵ Ibid., 464.

²⁶ Montgomery, David, “The Working Classes of the Pre-Industrial American City, 1780–1830,” Labor History 9 (Winter 1968): 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He regularly taught a graduate seminar on antebellum working-class history that became a key venue for studying a vast array of primary sources that he was exploring in his own work.

²⁷ Ibid., 21–22.

²⁸ Ibid., 5–6, 7, 10–11, 13–15, 17–20.

²⁹ Some of the influence of Montgomery's work on studies of the antebellum working classes came directly through his own students, like Laurie, Bruce, whose Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia, 1980)Google Scholar began as a dissertation with Montgomery at Pittsburgh. Some of his influence was indirect, evident in a wide-ranging set of new works that appeared over the next two decades and beyond. Writing in the late 1960s, Montgomery based his challenge to the reigning orthodoxies on a rich body of primary sources that ranged from Joseph Tuckerman, Matthew Carey, Henry C. Carey, and Frances Wright to the texts of journeymen's conspiracy trials, and an array of memoirs, newspaper accounts, and registers.

³⁰ Montgomery, David, “The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in the Kensington Riots of 1844,” Journal of Social History 5 (Summer 1972): 411–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Ibid., 411, 421.

³² In addition to Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850, which covers some of the same ground, Feldberg, Michael, The Philadelphia Riot of 1844: A Study in Ethnic Conflict (Westport, CT, 1975)Google Scholar; Sutton, William, Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore (University Park, PA, 1998)Google Scholar also highlights the aggressive role of evangelical Protestantism in the face of a growing urban, Irish Catholic working class. For a later period, Fones-Wolf, Ken, Trade Union Gospel: Christianity and Labor in Industrial Philadelphia, 1865–1915 (Philadelphia, 1989)Google Scholar, would take up the challenge of “bringing religion back in” to the study of working-class life and politics; also Lazerow, Jama, Religion and the Working Class in Antebellum America (Washington, DC, 1995)Google Scholar.

³³ For all the frustrating features of the debate over “synthesis” during these years, the imperative to find some ways to assemble the particularities of local- and trade-specific studies into an intelligible whole was widely shared. The “synthesis conference” at Northern Illinois University in 1984 was symptomatic of both that impulse and its frustration; see Moody, J. Carroll and Harris, Alice Kessler, eds., Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problems of Synthesis (DeKalb, IL, 1989)Google Scholar.

³⁴ Montgomery, David, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Social Science History 4 (Winter 1980): 81–104Google Scholar; and Montgomery, “Labor and the Republic in Industrial America, 1860–1920,” Le Mouvement Social 111 (Apr.–June 1980): 201–15Google Scholar. Two other essays published the same year also reflect Montgomery's synthesizing tendencies, an extended review essay, “To Study the People,” Labor History 21 (Fall 1980): 485–512CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Irish and the American Labor Movement” in America and Ireland, 1776–1876: The American Identity and the Irish Connection, eds. Doyle, David N. and Edwards, Owen Dudley (Westport, CT, 1980), 205–18Google Scholar.

³⁵ Significant studies of strikes in particular communities, economic sectors, or periods were already underway or had been recently published. My own dissertation and then book, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana, IL, 1987)Google Scholar grew in part from our shared interest in strikes and their local and social context.

³⁶ Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” 81.

³⁷ Hobsbawm, Eric J., Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964)Google Scholar; and Perrot, Michelle, Les ouvriers en grève: France, 1871–1890 (Paris, 1974)Google Scholar.

³⁸ Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” 86–93.

³⁹ Ibid., 95–100.

⁴⁰ The revised picture of the Knights of Labor that challenged the interpretations of the Commons school—most notably Selig Perlman and later Gerald Grob—had been in evidence at a Newberry Conference in 1979 commemorating the centenary of the founding of the KOL. Montgomery and Herbert Gutman presided at the conference, and the work of their students and others at various stages of dissertation work was on display. Presenters included Jon Garlock, Susan Levine, Leon Fink, Richard Oestreicher, David Brundage, Frank Couvares, Peter Rachleff, Greg Kealey, Bryan Palmer, Marjorie Murphy, Julie Blodgett, Clare Horner, John Bennett, Alan Dawley, and myself, among others.

⁴¹ Montgomery, “Labor and the Republic in Industrial America,” 201–02. In terms that reappeared in revised form in the introduction to The Fall of the House of Labor, Montgomery spoke of an “ethic of mutuality,” which “daily experience nurtured at work, in the residential neighborhood, and to some extent in the family.” He also spoke of class consciousness as both a product of those experiences and “a project” carried forward by working-class activists and others.

⁴² Montgomery, “Labor and the Republic in Industrial America,” 206; this seeming contradiction was perhaps most fully developed in Fink, Leon, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, IL, 1983)Google Scholar.

⁴³ Montgomery, “Labor and the Republic in Industrial America,” 203–04, 206–08, 210.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 211.

⁴⁵ Montgomery, David, “Workers' Movements in the United States confront Imperialism: The Progressive Era Experience,” Journal of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era 7 (Jan. 2008): 7–42Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Greene, Julie, “The Global Montgomery: Assessing the Place of the World in David Montgomery's Historical Writing,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 10 (Spring 2013): 57–63Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ van der Linden, Marcel, “David Montgomery (1927–2011),” International Review of Social History 57 (Aug. 2012): 163–67Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ See, for example, Greene, Julie, “Historians of the World: Transnational Forces, Nation-States, and the Practice of U.S. History” in Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Fink, Leon (New York, 2011), 12–17Google Scholar; Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; and Greene, “The Labor of Empire: Recent Scholarship on U.S. History and Imperialism,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1 (Summer 2004): 113–29Google Scholar; Stromquist, Shelton, “Municipal Socialism and the Contested Politics of Everyday Life, 1890–1920” in Interventions: The Impact of Labour Movements on Social and Cultural Development, eds. Mayer, David and Mittag, Jürgen (Leipzig, 2013), 219–44Google Scholar; Stromquist, “Claiming Political Space: Workers, Municipal Socialism, and the Reconstruction of Local Democracy in Transnational Perspective” in Workers across the Americas, ed. Fink, 303–28; Stromquist, “Railroad Workers and the Global Economy: Historical Patterns,” in Towards a Global Labor History in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Lucassen, Jan and van der Linden, Marcel (Bern, 2006), 623–48Google Scholar; Richards, Yevette, Maida Springer: Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader (Pittsburgh, 2000)Google Scholar; and Kirk, Neville, Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London, 2003)Google Scholar, among others.

⁴⁹ Montgomery, “Workers’ Movements in the United States Confront Imperialism.”

⁵⁰ Montgomery interview, 176.

⁵¹ Montgomery, David, “Racism, Immigrants, and Political Reform,” Journal of American History 87 (Mar. 2001): 1260CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² Ibid., 1274.