This issue celebrates the fortieth anniversary of International Labor and Working-Class History. A relative youngster, it was a product of the second of two waves that resulted in the foundation of many labor history journals and societies.1 The first wave, between roughly 1956 and 1962 included the Dutch-based International Review of Social History; 2 the Feltrinelli Institute's Annali in Italy; Le mouvement social in France; Labor History in the United States; the British Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History;3 the West German Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte; and Australia's Labour History. These journals developed at a time when organized labor and left-wing politics were strong and confident of their future,4 although many who were active in these journals were highly critical of the political strategies of the existing Left and, in Eric Hobsbawm's words, viewed them “as an attempt to find a way forward in Left politics through historical reflection.”5 The second wave of journal creation in labor history took place in the 1970s and included not only ILWCH (1972), but Radical History Review (1975), Labour/Le Travail (1976), and History Workshop Journal (1976). These journals were especially shaped by the radicalism of the 1960s—the Vietnam War, the Cuban revolution, and the wave of student, feminist, and left-wing unrest in Europe and the world in 1968 and subsequently.6 The new journals were more transnational and more comparative; malleable youths, these journals were more susceptible to the influence of the social movements evolving around them. They were more attentive to the relationship between metropole and colonial territories and more focused on the burgeoning fields of black studies and women's history than was true earlier. Drawing upon the work of sociologists, political scientists, and demographers, they were also animated by the tremendous explosion of social history in the 1960s and 1970s and new research underway on social protest movements, race, and social conditions.7

David Montgomery, union organizer, political and civil rights activist, and well-known scholar of American labor history died suddenly on December 2, 2011. A retired Yale University Farnum Professor of History, he is equally well known for his publications and skill as a teacher as he was as an advocate for equality and for his tireless support for workers and trade unions. Through his published works and lectures—in English, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish—Montgomery's influence as a historian of workers' history and their struggles for equality and survival was felt by workers, students, and academics in several countries.

David Montgomery, the leading labor historian in the United States, died on December 2, 2011, at age eighty-four. His many articles and books, especially Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872; Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles; and The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925, profoundly reshaped our understanding of the history of American workers.

David Montgomery was larger than life in his personal style and self-presentation as well as in his spirit. Both watching and listening to him in conversation were a treat. So absorbed would he become in explaining some little-known incident of labor militancy that his entire body would get involved, his hand gestures and physical movements growing broader, requiring his listener to stand back to get a fuller view. His intense interest in labor history and patient willingness to share his knowledge with younger scholars testified to his faith in labor far more effectively than any manifesto. He communicated a sense of labor history as a shared enterprise in which we were all fellow workers.

It was at Warwick that I first met David. I was an MA student in Comparative British and American Labour and Social History during the academic year 1968–1969. David's genuinely honest, open, and down-to-earth approach to his students and teaching and learning in general appealed to many like myself who had been raised in solid, respectable, independent, and self-respecting working-class households. He treated me fairly and squarely, without any hint of those patronizing and condescending attitudes, which sometimes characterize middle-class academics in their treatment of working-class students. Montgomery, like Edward Thompson, expected us to work hard and would have no truck with those self-indulgent students who regarded political activism as a valid substitute for academic study. True to his 1950s past, David kept regular “factory” hours. He strongly disapproved of lateness or absence in the submission of work and attendance at lectures and seminars. As “apprentices,” we, the MA postgraduates, were to be rigorously instructed in the rules and methods of the trade by Montgomery and the other “master craftsmen” at Warwick. As part of our training, we were subjected to full critical gaze of these masters when we presented our papers and research findings to them at three-hour combined postgraduate and staff seminars on Friday afternoons. Escape and a mixture of relief and reward were found immediately afterward in the student bar.

I remember my very first seminar with David Montgomery at the University of Pittsburgh in January 1976. Here I was, a working-class kid from Bridgeport, Connecticut, trying to switch from rank-and-file labor activism to an academic career. Montgomery's classroom was an intense experience. His seminars were a combination of readings in secondary sources as well as deep reading in primary sources (whether business magazines, industrial relations expert reports, or radical and union journals). In addition, there were always student-generated political debates on one or another left-wing perspective—we had widely diverse ideological leanings! David accepted all approaches in the New Labor History, as long as the evidence was there.

David and Marty Montgomery had enormous influence over my life and intellectual work, in ways that I continue to discover on a daily basis. I first heard about David in the early 1980s when I started Yale College because he was well known for being a wonderful lecturer. When I went to college, we were deep in the middle of Reagan's first term as president. Those were conservative times. Many of us undergraduates had no direct memories of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, or the political unrest of the late 1960s and looked forward to becoming lawyers or working on Wall Street. Someone recommended that I take David Montgomery's class because he was a well-known professor. So along with a few hundred of my classmates, I trooped along to the Lindsley-Chit 101 classroom. I do not remember much of those initial lectures, but I do remember how David had great stage presence as he strode around the stage and told us stories about everyday people who fought for workers' rights.

I'd like to begin with a disclosure: I was not an official student of David Montgomery. By “official,” I mean to signal the parochial ways in which institutions recognize and quantify mentorship. I came to Yale University too late to have the opportunity to work with him in any formal way; I entered the combined doctoral program in African American studies and American studies there in the fall of 2002, long after David had retired. While this fact presented a major obstacle to those of my graduate colleagues who hoped to work with him, it was only a minor disadvantage for me because David and I were already connected through a genealogy of mentoring; my college mentor was Peter Rachleff, one of David's Pitt students, and he made sure that each of us knew of the other upon my arrival in New Haven. What I didn't know of David—and there was a lot—I would soon learn through my numerous engagements with him and his work.

I was not one of David's students, though I wanted to be. I had applied to Yale for graduate school and had gone up to New Haven to meet him beforehand. But I didn't get in. Apparently, the admissions committee (which he wasn't on that year) considered it too risky to admit someone who had worked in the labor movement, in light of the union organizing going on among Yale's graduate students and employees. I thought this was ironic because, although I was sympathetic to the Yale organizing, I was searching for the life of the mind. If I had wanted to organize workers, I would have continued what I was already doing. In any case, I ended up elsewhere, and I've had no complaints about my graduate education. David and I stayed in touch over the years, and I was honored by a kind review he wrote of my first book in the Journal of Social History.

David Montgomery was both an extraordinary man and an extraordinary historian. All one needs to do is look at his autobiographical interview, which appeared in Visions of History in 1983, to know this. I had the good fortune of studying and then collaborating with David from 1979 at the University of Pittsburgh until the late 1990s at Yale University. While he had been recruited to Yale in the wake of the academic and political success of his Workers' Control in America, in my view his most beautiful book remains his first, Beyond Equality. Told with passion, intelligence, and an impressive richness of detail, it is the remarkable story of American labor and the Left immediately after the Civil War. At that time, the Republican Party, led by a friend of Marx, pursued arguably the most progressive policies of any Western government in history, embodying that world of free labor and social and racial equality, which had emerged victorious from the war against slavery. David discovered and reconstructed this world, with its special blend of liberty and justice, after having spent ten years as a skilled worker and communist trade unionist in the factories of the 1950s. During that period, he shared his political commitment with his radiant wife, Marty, who was from a large African American communist family in Chicago. In fact, the two met on a ship that was carrying both of them to the World Youth Congress in Prague.

David Montgomery's semester as a Fulbright lecturer at the State University of Campinas, Brazil, in 1986 proved quite memorable. Bela Bianca, a member of the anthropology department who had known David and Marty when she was on a postdoctoral grant at Yale, made the initial contacts. A few specialists here had read Workers' Control in America at the time, but his work was not yet widely known in Brazil. However, questions about the labor process and control over production had become subjects of lively academic debate, largely on the basis of works by social scientists. The labor historians then being read were primarily French and British.

David Montgomery was a man of so many parts that it is impossible for a brief tribute to do justice to his many-faceted life and career. I will limit myself to my personal experience with David and to his influence on my own work.

The idea that the histories of different regions in the world are interconnected is not particularly novel; it already existed several centuries ago. Thus, for example, when the German historian and playwright Friedrich Schiller was granted a chair at the University of Jena in 1789, he declared in his inaugural address that “the most remote regions of the world contribute to our luxury.” After all, he continued, “The clothes we wear, the spices in our food, and the price for which we buy them, many of our strongest medicines, and also many new tools of our destruction—do they not presuppose a Columbus who discovered America, a Vasco da Gama who circumnavigated the tip of Africa”?2 Nevertheless it took quite some time before professional historians began to consider these global connections seriously in their research. Colonial and “imperial” historians led the way. They were joined by economic historians. Labor historians became interested in intercontinental perspectives only more recently; until the 1970s, they typically locked themselves into the framework of individual nation-states. Even great innovators in the discipline, such as E. P. Thompson, thought mostly in terms of “national” working classes.