David Montgomery (September 22-23)

The Graduate History Society hosts David Montgomery. Professor Montgomery has had a powerful shaping influence on the field of labor history, not only through his books and lectures but through the work of more than fifty graduate students whom he trained at the University of Pittsburgh and Yale. He worked closely as a collaborator with E.P. Thompson, and many would argue Montgomery has been a figure of comparable stature to Thompson in terms of his impact on the “new labor history” in the U.S. and beyond. He has also, like Thompson, been consistently active in the political and trade union realm ­ a truly activist intellectual force. As a former trade union activist himself, he never lost touch with his trade (he was a machinist) or with the labor movement, particularly with the UE (the parent union of UE-COGS).

is publications include The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Pulitzer Prize finalist nomination 1988), Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (1993), Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (1979), and Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (1967). He is a past president of the Organization of American Historians and for many years edited the journal International Labor and Working-Class History. Montgomery is the Farnam Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University.