Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! narrates the dramatic story of repeated and massive revolts by ordinary working people in America. Involving nationwide general strikes, the seizure of vast industrial establishments, nonviolent direct action on a massive scale, and armed battles with artillery and tanks, this exciting hidden history is told from the point of view of the rank-and-file workers who lived it. Encompassing the repeated repression of workers’ rebellions by company-sponsored violence, local police, state militias, and the U.S. Army and National Guard, it reveals a dimension of American history rarely found in the usual high school or college history course.

In July of 1877, one year after the celebration of the one hundredth birthday of the United States, the country was prostrate after five years of economic depression. Railroad workers at Martinsburg, West Virginia, went out on strike against still another wage cut.

Despite the intervention of the state militia and the US army, the strike extended up the Baltimore & Ohio line and spread rapidly to other lines. The railroad strikes carried the spark of rebellion to other workers in the great cities, including the unemployed.

Within a few days, 100,000 workers were on strike in the first nationwide labor upheaval. In St. Louis, the Great Strike developed into a systematically organized and complete shutdown of all industry— the first truly general strike in history.

In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha expands our view beyond the accepted temporal and spatial bounds of Reconstruction, which is customarily said to have begun in 1865 with the end of the war, and to have come to a close when the "corrupt bargain" of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for the fall of the last southern Reconstruction state governments. The main concern of Reconstruction was the plight of the formerly enslaved, but its fall affected other groups as well: women, workers, immigrants, and Native Americans. From the election of black legislators across the South in the late 1860s to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the colonial war in the Philippines in the 1890s, Sinha narrates the major episodes of the era and introduces us to key individuals, famous and otherwise, who helped remake American democracy, or whose actions spelled its doom

The rise of the American labor movement was characterized by bloody and revolutionary battles. From the first famous martyrs, the Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coal fields in the nineteenth century, to the crucial workers’ victory of the 1930s in the sit-down strikes against General Motors, it has a history of pitched battles that frequently erupted into open warfare

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[8] Scenes and incidents at the principal points of the labor insurrection: (1) Ill. - the first attack by Chicago police on the mob; (2) Penn. - ruins of the round-house and carshops at Pittsburgh; (3) N.Y. - Rioters tearing up rails of bridge at Corning; (4) N.Y. - rioters marching down NYCentral track at West Albany; (5) N.Y. Constr. gang repairing trakcs at Corning, under protection of 23d Regt, NYSNG; (6) Mob threatening members of the 9th Regt., NYSNG, at Delevan House, Albany; (7) 9th Regt NYSNG takign poss. West Albany freightyards (8) constr. gang [?]righting cars, protected by militia, Corning.

On November 23, 1887, the Louisiana Militia, aided by bands of prominent white citizens, shot and killed 30 to 60 unarmed striking Black sugar workers in what became known as the Thibodaux Massacre.

Black Louisiana sugarcane workers, in cooperation with the racially integrated Knights of Labor, had gone on strike at the beginning of November in 1887 over their meager pay issued in scrip, not cash. 

In The St. Louis Commune of 1877 Mark Kruger tells the riveting story of how workers assumed political control in St. Louis, Missouri. Kruger examines the roots of the St. Louis Commune—focusing on the 1848 German revolution, the Paris Commune, and the First International. Not only was 1877 the first instance of a general strike in U.S. history; it was also the first time workers took control of a major American city and the first time a city was ruled by a communist party.

This book is a comprehensive new history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe.

Railroad titan George Pullman’s name was once synonymous with luxury. His sleeping cars changed how some Americans rode the rails. But when his success didn’t trickle down to the people who built, operated, and staffed his cars, a rebellion ensued. While the first major strike ultimately failed, a group of Black workers later found success through organizing, paving the way for a Black middle class and a civil rights movement that forever changed the course of American history.

In 1877, workers across the country shocked the rich and powerful when they shut down the railroads in the first national industrial strike, sparking rebellions and even take-overs of major cities. What can this explosion of working class power teach us today?