He is credited, along with David Brody and Herbert Gutman, with founding the field of "new labor history" in the U.S.[2] Montgomery entered undergraduate school at Swarthmore College following a stint in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, from which he was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant.
On sabbatical from that institution, Montgomery spent two years working in England with historian E. P. Thompson to establish the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick.
Noam Chomsky, the renowned professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and political activist, called the book one of the definitive works on the American labor struggle.
He claimed that over the presidential administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, access to government documents had been sharply reduced and that this has resulted in less academic freedom.
[7] In the spring of 2012 the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians approved a new book award in the field of labor and working class history to be named after David Montgomery.
[8] Fundraising was begun to build a $50,000 endowment for the prize, after which time the David Montgomery award is to be presented annually by the OAH in conjunction with the Labor and Working-Class History Association.