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Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

David Montgomery
David Montgomery*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Strikes have always held great fascination for historians of the working class. Collective work stoppages tear the tissue of “normal life,” and in doing so they provide historians with revealing glimpses of class relations and attitudes, which arise from but are disguised by the daily production and distribution of commodities. Because strikers have disobeyed social norms, which reflect capitalist ways of making and acquiring things and which are enforced by socially legitimized economic and legal sanctions, they must reorder relationships among themselves in accordance with their own social code and apply their own group sanctions to its violators.

In recent years many studies of strikes have analyzed particular episodes in detail, in an effort to shed light on the social relations of some epoch through local history (Gutman, 1963; Zeigler, 1977; Ham-mett, 1975; Cumbler, 1974). An older tradition, running from Dacus through Brecher, examined a series of strikes in order to derive political lessons from them (how to dampen or fan the flames of discontent) [Dacus, 1877; Brecher, 1972; Crook, 1931].

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , Winter 1980 , pp. 81 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1980 

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