This is the first in a five volume series that will collect much of trade unionist and Socialist Party founding father Eugene V. Debs’ work for the first time in a single place. The collection makes readily accessible approximately 150 documents, only a few of which were ever subsequently republished, by one of the seminal figures in the labor movement of his era. Illuminating 19th Century labor history, particularly the complex and shifting situation in the transportation industry, this volume provides a basis for deeper understanding of Debs and his role later during the glory days of the Socialist Party of America.
Tim Davenport (b. 1961) is an independent scholar from Corvallis, Oregon. He holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from Oregon State University. He has been a very active content-writer for Wikipedia since 2008, concentrating on early 20th century political biography and the history of political organizations. He is the creator of the Early American Marxism website (marxisthistory.org) and a long-time volunteer with Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) and regularly contributes scans of rare material to the Internet Archive (archive.org).
He has co-edited The "American Exceptionalism" of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940 with Paul LeBlanc [Haymarket, 2018] and The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs with David Walters [in six volumes, Haymarket, 2019–].
Davenport is a member of the Organization of American Historians, Historians of American Communism, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the Labor and Working Class History Association. He is also an active collector of political books and pamphlets.
David Walters lives in Pacifica, California, originally hails from New York City. Having been formally a member of several socialist organizations since High School in 1972, David was active in the labor movement and is now a retired member of IBEW 1245. He now dedicates himself toward the building of the Marxists Internet Archive which he helped found in the mid-1990s. Additionally he is the Director of the San Francisco based Holt Labor Library, a brick-and-mortar library for papers, documents and journals of the labor and revolutionary left.
Publication date: February 19, 2019
