A Labored Mid-Atlantic Region Defined, Not Discovered: Suggestions on the Intersections of Labor and Regional History

Despite expansive agendas in labor and working-class history, a Mid-Atlantic regional perspective has not been, and likely will not be, deemed useful in discerning historical change and causation for core questions in the field. Following a brief survey of labor historiography and its emerging directions, the author considers diverse ways of “finding” a region and regional identities through routes of work and place, and suggests that a Mid-Atlantic labor identity might be found in the “drama and debris” of the Great Strike of 1877 and during deindustrialization in the 1970s.