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.

One assigned reading that caught my attention was an as-yet-unpublished manuscript by David on First World War labor struggles. There I learned about the First World War strike wave that had engulfed Bridgeport. WHAT? I had to go to grad school to learn about labor struggles that had happened in my hometown—in which my grandfather, a brass molder, had probably been involved? No one in Bridgeport knew about this either. This was too much, and I was hooked. I particularly resonated with David's shop-floor approach, which revealed the same sorts of dynamics that I had witnessed in my own white-collar organizing. He even lent me his battered old machinist's manual so I could figure out the many debates about job classifications as I delved into my own local research on the topic.

Of course, David was also a pioneer in the international approach to labor history, a perspective that is today more fashionably labeled transnationalism. He always presented an expansive view of the New Labor History to include connections among the emerging working classes of many countries since the rise of capitalism, including immigration and ethnic studies. Moreover, he directly facilitated the links among labor (or “labour,” to accommodate the British and Canadian) historians through taking on the International Labor and Working Class History journal after the unexpected death of its founder, Robert F. Wheeler, in 1977. Wheeler, a historian of modern Germany and the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), had received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 1970, where his principal adviser was Richard N. Hunt; he apparently never worked with David. However, Wheeler had imbibed the spirit of the USPD and the New Labor History in his years of working in many European archives, and he knew everybody who was working in the same archives. Thus he established the European Labor and Working Class History Newsletter to promote this new approach to political and labor history, and to connect all who were working on similar topics. He also established the Study Group on European Labor and Working Class History, which affiliated with the American Historical Association and sponsored sessions there in 1974 through 1976. In 1976, it became the biannual journal International Labor and Working Class History (ILWCH), each issue some fifty unadorned pages. When Wheeler died at age thirty-seven, it was unclear whether his journal would continue.

David Montgomery agreed to take over as editor and expand it into the journal we know today. I was its first assistant editor in 1978–1979, and all we had to start with was one box of files and a long subscriber list, which included many university libraries. David used the contacts he had made in Warwick, England, in the late 1960s during his teaching year there, brought together Edward and Dorothy Thompson and others in England, the new labor historians in France around the journal Le mouvement social, those in the Netherlands around Amsterdam's International Institute of Social History, the Canadians around the journal Labour/Le Travailleur (as it was titled then), Wheeler's German historian contacts, and connected them with American historians to create a dialogue that firmly established the New Labor History as a formidable field. The first few issues of ILWCH were filled with reports from labor history conferences in five countries, review essays on contentious concepts in this new field, and book reviews. It also included a list of “Current Research,” just as Wheeler had done, to let folks know who was doing what. In those days before the personal computer—let alone the Internet—this itself was worth the subscription price! It is difficult to imagine what our field would have been like if not for the key networking that David accomplished in those years. The fact that he was able to bring ILWCH to Yale when he moved there in 1980 was clear proof of the wisdom of the Yale history department in embracing David and the New Labor History. ILWCH later expanded to include traditional articles, but its core remained comparative essays, research and conference reports, and book reviews.

In sum, David contributed a shop-floor perspective to the new labor and social history of the early 1970s, along with an internationalist perspective that reached far beyond the shop floor. He was truly the master mechanic and always in tune with working people's concerns and aspirations. He always kept in mind the old question, Why do those who work the hardest get the least? He was, at his core, passionately committed to social justice and a better world. As we approach the first anniversary of his death, I still cannot believe he is gone—he is irreplaceable. But as David himself had remarked in his eulogy at the NYC memorial to the late E.P. Thompson in 1993, the work will go on. In that spirit, the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) has inaugurated the David Montgomery Book Award in Labor and Working-Class History, to be given by the Organization of American Historians (OAH). The fund drive to endow this award is underway.

Editor's Note: If you are interested in contributing to the endowment of the David Montgomery Book Award, see the form near the front of this issue of ILWCH or visit: www.oah.org/donate/montgomeryaward.html