Charles “Chuck” Bergquist passed away peacefully in his sleep on July 30, 2020. An intense, politically engaged, generous scholar and friend, he was a pathbreaking activist historian of labor and capitalism who made major contributions to Colombian history and the comparative history of the Americas.
Born to a working-class family in 1942, Bergquist grew up in Seattle, known for its strong culture of union organizing, the 1919 general strike, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). From a young age, he worked in numerous jobs, as a roofer, a low-level draftsman—his father was a draftsman at Boeing—and then an ambulance driver during university to provide for his family.
In the American Century, as publisher Henry Luce called it, upward social mobility through public education was still possible for sons, and to a lesser extent daughters, of the working class. Bergquist won a fellowship to the University of Chicago but...
