DANIEL J. WALKOWITZ
"I'VE BEEN WORKING ON THE RAILROAD:" THE PULLMAN CAR PORTER

Rail travel in early twentieth-century America brought strangers together onto rail cars made and serviced by two unions whose recent histories have become lore in the history of American labor, the African American sleeping car porters and the American Railway Union. The 1894 Pullman Strike would catapult Eugene V. Debs to prominence in American labor and ultimately as leader of American socialism, but the strike’s outcome and the intervention of the government would also set precedents that would shape the history of public work and public service in the US to the present.

Professor Daniel J. Walkowitz holds joint appointments in the department of Social & Cultural Analysis and Department of History at New York University. A specialist in American labor and urban history, his most recent books are City Folk: English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk in Modern America, and an edited collected with Donna Haverty-Stacke, Rethinking US Labor History.

(Click image below to play video)