Introduction to \u3ci\u3eThe Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890’s\u3c/i\u3e

The strike of Pullman carshop employees and the subsequent boycott that disrupted rail traffic throughout the territory west of Chicago in June-July 1894 marked the culmination of nearly two decades of the most severe and sustained labor conflict in American history. Yet until very recently little new scholarship has focused on the meaning of the Pullman strike and its historical context. By offering a close reading of contemporary perceptions of the strike and by examining the organizational and political continuities and discontinuities the Pullman conflict reveals, these essays resituate the strike in its historical context. They demonstrate that Pullman played an important role in defining the crisis of the 1890s, shaping a changing legal environment, spurring the development of a regulatory state, and fostering a new politics of progressive reform. On September 23-24, 1994, more than two hundred scholars, students, educators, labor activists, and interested members of the public gathered at Indiana State University in Terre Haute to reconsider the Pullman strike in the light of new historical scholarship in labor history. The conference featured public addresses by the historians David Montgomery and Nick Salvatore and Jack Scheinckman, the president of the Amalgamated Textile Workers\u27 Union (now UNITE—the Union of Needle Trades, Industrial and Textile Employees). Scholars delivered thirty-six papers at thirteen sessions that focused on various dimensions of the strike and its meaning. This edited collection contains revised versions of key conference papers addressing the significance of the Pullman strike in its wider historical context

Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction

In this sweeping interpretive history of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, historians John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov boldly trace the evolution of a modern social order. Combining a mastery of historical and political detail with a sophisticated theoretical frame, Jentz and Schneirov examine the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago during the critical decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, a period that saw the rise of a permanent wage worker class and the formation of an industrial upper class. Jentz and Schneirov demonstrate how a new political economy, based on wage labor and capital accumulation in manufacturing, superseded an older mercantile economy that relied on speculative trading and artisan production. The city\u27s leading business interests were unable to stabilize their new system without the participation of the new working class, a German and Irish ethnic mix that included radical ideas transplanted from Europe. Jentz and Schneirov examine how debates over slave labor were transformed into debates over free labor as the city\u27s wage-earning working class developed a distinctive culture and politics. The new social movements that arose in this era--labor, socialism, urban populism, businessmen\u27s municipal reform, Protestant revivalism, and women\u27s activism--constituted the substance of a new post-bellum democratic politics that took shape in the 1860s and \u2770s. When the Depression of 1873 brought increased crime and financial panic, Chicago\u27s new upper class developed municipal reform in an attempt to reassert its leadership. Setting local detail against a national canvas of partisan ideology and the seismic structural shifts of Reconstruction, Chicago in the Age of Capital vividly depicts the upheavals integral to building capitalism.https://epublications.marquette.edu/marq_fac-book/1178/thumbnail.jp

Introduction to <i>The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890’s</i>

The strike of Pullman carshop employees and the subsequent boycott that disrupted rail traffic throughout the territory west of Chicago in June-July 1894 marked the culmination of nearly two decades of the most severe and sustained labor conflict in American history. Yet until very recently little new scholarship has focused on the meaning of the Pullman strike and its historical context. By offering a close reading of contemporary perceptions of the strike and by examining the organizational and political continuities and discontinuities the Pullman conflict reveals, these essays resituate the strike in its historical context. They demonstrate that Pullman played an important role in defining the crisis of the 1890s, shaping a changing legal environment, spurring the development of a regulatory state, and fostering a new politics of progressive reform. On September 23-24, 1994, more than two hundred scholars, students, educators, labor activists, and interested members of the public gathered at Indiana State University in Terre Haute to reconsider the Pullman strike in the light of new historical scholarship in labor history. The conference featured public addresses by the historians David Montgomery and Nick Salvatore and Jack Scheinckman, the president of the Amalgamated Textile Workers' Union (now UNITE—the Union of Needle Trades, Industrial and Textile Employees). Scholars delivered thirty-six papers at thirteen sessions that focused on various dimensions of the strike and its meaning. This edited collection contains revised versions of key conference papers addressing the significance of the Pullman strike in its wider historical context.Salvatore6_Introduction_Pullman_Strike_and_the_Crisis_of_the_1890s_post_print.pdf: 3400 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020