ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the author's view on the American mass strikes from the bits and pieces he tracked down in the library. Conventional academic labor history largely ignored mass strikes or treated them as irrational aberrations on the way to orderly collective bargaining. Left historians held a surprisingly similar view, focusing on the organization of unions and political movements more than on what workers themselves were doing. A collection of self-styled New Left historical writings published in 1969 had only one essay dealing with the industrial working class, titled 'Urbanization, Migration, and Social Mobility' in Late Nineteenth-Century America. Strike!'s emphasis on periods of mass strike, worker self-organization, and endemic conflict between unions and workers has not found a great deal of resonance among subsequent historians of American labor. Understanding what he called the mass strike process can still teach us much both about the actual history of the working class and about the emergence of new common preservations.
