History: The Great Railroad Strike of 1877

While I'm at it, the Great Railroad Strike really is an amazing piece of history--just like the draft riots mentioned in a previous post--very dramatic and completely missing from history books--or if it was mentioned, it certainly made no impression on me at the time. I certainly would never have imagined that anything like what happened, had ever occurred in US history--that the initial flare-up in Pittsburgh touched off a 14-city general strike, and that the rail yards in Pittsburgh were completely destroyed.

The University of Pittsburgh has some great photos of the immediate aftermath on their site. Here's a little teaser...

There's an archival document introducing the photos which reads:
"THE RAILROAD WAR at Pittsburgh, July 21-22, 1877
The following list of Stereographs...gives a complet [sic] historical view of the district burnt over..."

"Opposite 16th St., looking up the track"	"Interior of Upper Round House"
	(left) "Opposite 32nd and 31st streets"

Heh--and they thought the "Battle of Seattle" in 1999 was bad! People have short memories.

Amazing that something termed a "war" by contemporaries could just vanish from people's consciousness...

The same website has other great primary source documents, listed on this page: Document Sets. Doncha just love primary sources?

Oops, have to go for now--maybe I'll add to this later--it's quite a story.