David Montgomery (historian)

David Montgomery (born December 1, 1927 in Bryn Mawr (Pennsylvania) , † December 2, 2011 ) was an American historian. In the USA he was the founder of new labor history with David Brody and Herbert Gutman , whereby he was able to fall back on his own experience as an active trade unionist in the 1950s. He was Fanham Professor of History at Yale University .

Montgomery studied at Swarthmore College with a brief stint as staff sergeant in the United States Army Corps of Engineers in the Manhattan Project , and received his bachelor's degree in political science in 1950. He then spent ten years as a machinist in New York City and St. Paul, Minnesota (he taught himself the necessary skills) and during this time was active in various unions such as the Teamsters, International Association of Machinists and United Electrical Workers Union. He was a member of the Communist Party from the early 1950s to 1957 and he was blacklisted during this McCarthy era so he lost or failed to run jobs. That was one reason why he studied history from 1959 at the University of Minnesota, where he received his master's degree in 1960 and his doctorate in 1962. He then briefly taught at Hamline University in St. Paul. From 1963 he was an assistant professor and later professor at the University of Pittsburgh and in 1976 he was the history department. After his first book, Beyond equality , appeared in 1967 , he spent two sabbatical years at the University of Warwick , where he founded the Center for the Study of Social History with Edward P. Thompson . Back in Pittsburgh he became head of the history department. From 1979 he was a professor at Yale, where he retired in 1997.

In addition to Warwick (1967 to 1969) he was visiting professor in Oxford (Harmsworth Professor of American History 1986/87), Brazil (University of Campinas 1986 as Fulbright Lecturer), Canada and the Netherlands (John Adams Professor of American Studies, University of Amsterdam).

He deals with the history of the working class and trade unions in the USA and with immigration, the American Civil War, reconstruction and the relationship of the civil rights movement and African American to trade unions. His book The fall of the house of labor on the history of the labor movement in the USA in the period after the Civil War up to 1925 gained him wide recognition, made it into the final round of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction books in 1989 and was praised by Noam Chomsky . Following the example of Edward P. Thompson, he expanded the history of the working class as part of the New Labor History away from the strictly Marxist theoretical view, history of the trade unions and economic perspective to the consideration of, for example, the working class culture and jobs and general socio-historical aspects.

He also remained active in the trade union movement at university. At Yale, he supported the Clerical Workers Organization strike. During the Vietnam War he was a frequent speaker at protests. In the 1990s, he criticized the government's declining access to information and, in the 2000s, a decline in academic freedom due to increased surveillance based on the USA PATRIOT Act .

Montgomery received several awards as a teacher, including the 1971 Distinguished Teaching Award in Pittsburgh and the 1982 Sidonie Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence at Yale, and he received the John R. Commerford Labor Education Award from the New York State Labor History Association.

He was the founder and editor of the journal International Labor and Working-Class History .

In 1999/2000 he was President of the Organization of American Historians . The latter named a book award in the field of the history of the labor movement after him.

He was married to Martel Montgomery and had two sons, including the economist Edward B. Montgomery .

Fonts

• Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872. Illinois Books ed. Champaign, Ill .: University of Illinois Press, 1981.
• with Horace Huntley: Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham. Champaign, Ill .: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
• Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994
• The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925. , New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987
• Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Web links

• Obituary in Yale News , Dec. 8, 2011