On this day in Labor History the year was 1903.

That was the day that is remembered in Virginia as the “Wreck of old 97”.

Old 97, also known as the Fast Mail, was a Southern Railway freight train.

It carried the mail from Washington D.C. to Atlanta, Georgia.

The train wreck happened on the leg of the trip from Monroe, Virginia to Spencer, North Carolina.

The train had come in late to Monroe.

It was reported that the railway company ordered the engineer to increase the speed of the train to make up time.

The company had to pay a penalty for delivering the mail late.

But when the trained neared Danville, Virginia the tracks curved at the Stillhouse Trestle Bridge.

The speed was too much.

Despite the engineer’s efforts to slow the train, it careened off the tracks and plummeted to the rocky ravine forty-five feet below.

Eleven of the sixteen people on board the train died, including the conductor, the engineer and the flagman, and both firemen.

The railway company blamed the wreck on the deceased engineer.

Newspapers across the country carried photos of the wreck.

The disaster became the subject of multiple ballads.

One version by Vernon Dalhart in 1924 is thought to be the first million-selling country record in the United States.

Johnny Cash recorded another well-known version of the song.

In 1993 an alternative country band took the name the “Old 97’s” harking back to the disaster and the songs it inspired.

Would you be willing to stand up in solidarity with your fellow workers, even if it cost you your job?

On this day in Labor History the workers at Mersey Docks and Harbor Company in Liverpool, England answered that question.

The year was 1995.

329 Mersey Dock workers refused to cross a picket line that was being walked against another company on the docks.

The workers at Torside had been fired for protesting against erosions in job security and increasingly unpredictable scheduling.

They were speaking out against the casualization of their labor.

When the Mersey Dock workers would not cross the Torside picket line, they too were fired.

Dock workers across the world stood up in solidarity with the Mersey workers against this unjust treatment.

They knew if it could happen in Liverpool, it might happen anywhere.

Pickets sprung up from Norway to Japan, from Australia to Italy and into the United States.

It was a global outpouring of solidarity.

The strike wore on for 850 days.

One year in to the strike, dockworkers held an international day of action in support of the Liverpool workers.

Finally, two-and-a-half years after they were fired, the dockworkers agreed to a settlement.

They did not get back their jobs.

But they did get severance pay.

A film was made about the struggle.

The proceeds were used to purchase a bar in Liverpool.

It is known as the Dockers Pub, and has become a space for working class organizing.

The International Dockworkers Council was also born from this strike.

Today the council has 90,000 members—a lasting movement of solidarity.

Twenty years after the strike, dockworkers from across the world gathered in Liverpool to remember the struggle.

On this day in Labor History the year was 1789.

That was the day that the United States Congress officially created the United States army.

Not everyone agreed that the U.S. should have a standing army.

Two years earlier, at the meeting that drafted the U.S. Constitution, James Madison warned against a permanent federal army.

He told those at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”

Since Madison was a strong proponent of a centralized federal government, his caution about the army was noteworthy.

Perhaps these warnings is why it took Congress until the last day of their session to finally approve the measure.

In fact, President George Washington had to write Congress not once but twice to get them to act on the issue.

Once it was approved, the first standing Army had about 800 members.

By comparison, in 2015 the Army had just under half a million in active duty soldiers.

To supplement the small army, Congress also made a provision for the President to call up troops from State militias.

A stated purpose for such call ups, was “protecting the inhabitants of the frontiers of United States from hostile incursions of the Indians.”

While in federal service, the State militias were supposed to receive “the same as the pay and subsistence” as the regular army.

One time various State militias were used was for the forced removal of the Cherokee people from the Southeast on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.

State militias were also deployed to break up labor strikes, such as in the Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania in 1892.