David Montgomery, one of the leading labor historians of his generation, passed away this morning at the age of 84. I got to know Montgomery’s work as a graduate student. The Fall of the House of Labor was one of the most brilliant–and daunting–things I read as a first-year graduate student.  I don’t think I ever had any aspirations to be a labor historian, but I remember feeling after reading Montgomery’s book that I would simply be incapable of producing anything like that.  The sheer amount of knowledge about the particulars of various late nineteenth-century industrial trades was staggering to Read more