In 1877, over 100,000 railroad workers staged the first labor strike to spread across state lines in United States history. The strike greatly disrupted the transportation of goods, and violent clashes killed scores of strikers. The strike gripped the nation at the time, but was it a success? In this lesson, students source, contextualize, and corroborate competing explanations of the strike’s outcomes.
Blockading of engines at Martinsburg, West Virginia, during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, illustration by Fred B. Schell, Harper's Weekly, August 11, 1877. From Britannica.
