David Montgomery
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David Montgomery is currently the Farnam Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. Montgomery is considered one of the foremost academics specializing in United States labor history and has written extensively on the subject. Along with David Brody and Herbert Gutman, he is credited with founding the field of "new labor history" in North America. Following the example of British historian E.P. Thompson, Montgomery encouraged a generation of labor historians to examine working-class culture, rather than simply their organizations. He was also President of the Organization of American Historians from 1999 to 2000.
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[edit] Biography
Following a stint in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, from which he was honorably discharged as a Staff Sergeant, Dr. Montgomery entered undergraduate school at Swarthmore College. He graduated in 1950 with Highest Honors and a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in Political Science.
Over the next ten years, Dr. Montgomery worked as a machinist first in New York City and later in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was as a machinist that Dr. Montgomery became involved in union activity as an active member of the United Electrical Workers, the International Association of Machinists, and the Teamsters union. The positions he held within these organizations ranged from shop steward, legislative committee member, and local executive board member.
In 1959 Dr. Montgomery entered graduate school at the University of Minnesota, from which he received his PhD in 1962. At that time he began working as a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, where he remained for the next fourteen years. In his time at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Montgomery wrote his first major book, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872, which was published in 1967. On a short leave from that institution, Dr. Montgomery spent two years working in England with fellow historian E. P. Thompson to establish the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick. He subsequently held visiting teacher positions at Oxford University and a number of other universities in Brasil, Canada, and the Netherlands.
On his return to the United States, he continued to teach at Pitt, becoming chair of the department, while he was recruited by several other institutions, eventually accepting the position at Yale. Dr. Montgomery taught courses about the history of working people in the United States, Civil War and Reconstruction, and immigration at Yale University. In 1988 his career-defining book The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 was published to wide acclaim. Noam Chomsky, the renowned and controversial professor of linguistics at MIT and political activist, called the book one of the definitive works on the American labor struggle. The book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist nominee.
At Yale and Pitt, Montgomery trained most of the present generation of labor historians now active in the United States. He was also influential through his editorship of the journal International Labor and Working-Class History, or "ILWCH."
In 2001 Dr. Montgomery published a book, in collaboration with Professor Horace Huntley of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, that uses oral histories to interpret and explore the involvement of African-American workers in various unions and the organized labor movement for Civil Rights. The book is called Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham.
Recently, Dr. Montgomery has been vocal on the subject of academic freedom, calling for wider availability of information for research and in favor of a larger scope of academic freedom. He claims that over the past two presidential administrations, those of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, access to government documents has sharply declined and that this has resulted in less academic freedom. Additionally, Dr. Montgomery has bemoaned the USA Patriot Act and its provisions for surveillance of academics and librarians, arguing they impede academic freedom [1].
[edit] Major works
- Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (1967)
- Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (1979)
- The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (1988)
- Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (1993)
- Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham (2001)
[edit] See also
- List of Yale University people
- List of University of Pittsburgh people
- List of University of Minnesota people
- List of Swarthmore College people
