History of the United States II / Unit 3 USH2 0331 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Great Railroad Strike
The idea
In eighteen seventy-seven railroads still reeling from the Panic of eighteen seventy-three cut wages again and again, and in July workers struck, beginning in West Virginia. The strike spread from Baltimore to St. Louis and lasted forty-five days. Digital History calls it the first general strike in the nation's history, and says governors in ten states mobilised sixty thousand militia. In Baltimore the militia killed eleven, the Yawp says, and in Pittsburgh troops killed twenty. Federal troops finally broke it.
In practice
Militia firing into a crowd of strikers, and fires set across Pittsburgh.
Where people slip
The anchor says the strikers gained nothing. The Yawp draws a different lesson: the defeat convinced workers they needed to organise, and union membership began to climb. Both are true, and the gap between them is the question a later entry asks directly.
Your place on the trail
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