The American historian John Rogers Commons (1862-1945) pioneered the study of labor movements in the United States.

John Commons was born on Oct. 13, 1862, in Richmond, Ind. He was educated at Oberlin College and at Johns Hopkins, where he studied under Richard T. Ely. He sat in the same seminars with another fledgling historian, Frederick Jackson Turner. In 1890 Commons married and became an instructor at Wesleyan University. He returned to Oberlin in 1891 and taught at the University of Indiana the next year. He did not complete his doctorate.

Commons's first book, Distribution of Wealth (1894), was based on a Turnerian framework. Commons claimed that a turning point had been reached in the economic affairs of the United States because of the disappearance of easily available land. In 1896 Commons went to Syracuse University to fill a chair in sociology, and the following year he published Proportional Representation. This work reflected his...