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 soon left; in 1963 he joined the Peace Corps, which sent him to Vergara, Cundinamarca, Colombia, to work with small coffee farmers. This precipitated Bergquist's lifetime engagement with Colombia and his fascination with the history of coffee production. In Vergara he met his first wife, Magola Bohórquez, the daughter of a small coffee grower who lived through the Thousand Days' War (1899–1902) as a boy. After the Peace Corps, Bergquist finished his BA at the University of Washington and went to Stanford University for graduate studies, writing his dissertation on the Thousand Days' War. Following his PhD in 1973, Bergquist spent 16 years teaching Latin American history at Duke University in North Carolina.However, Bergquist longed to return to the Pacific Northwest to teach in a public university. In 1989 he left Duke for the University of Washington, where he taught Latin American history and global labor history until retiring in 2008. In 1992, Bergquist cofounded the Harry Bridges Chair for Labor Studies, funded by more than 1,000 ILWU veterans, and later the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. As the chair in the mid-1990s, he created the interdisciplinary labor studies minor for undergraduates and took labor history to unionists and high school teachers; he then collaborated with the port workers to help organize the protest against the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting in 1999. At the University of Washington Bergquist met his second wife, Korean labor historian Hwasook Nam, who became his intellectual soulmate. Together, they made multiple trips to Colombia and South Korea, and Bergquist collected material for a comparative history of democracy and economic development in the two countries after 1950.In the 1980s and 1990s, Bergquist became deeply involved with the Universidad Nacional de Colombia's History Department in Bogotá. When Colombia's first history PhD program was launched, Bergquist taught one of the initial courses; he deferred chairing Washington's labor studies program in order to accept a Fulbright fellowship to teach at the Universidad Nacional. He became vitally involved in ongoing discussions and debates there, and in 1997 the Universidad Nacional awarded Charles Bergquist the title of honorary professor. He was greatly appreciated by colleagues, students, and historians in Colombia, the United States, and Canada. He was an inspiration and mentor to many, including Michael F. Jiménez, Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Mary Roldán, Richard Stoller, and Lina Britto.Though his work has been largely forgotten in the current intellectual climate, from the 1970s through the 1990s Bergquist was one of the leading historians of modern Latin America and the Caribbean working in the United States. Bergquist's published work was focused on the Western Hemisphere's economic, political, and cultural development after the American Revolution and the Wars of Independence. This widening of the comparative lens became explicit in his two final books, Labor and the Course of American Democracy: US History in Latin American Perspective (1996) and Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia (1986). However, the comparative approach was implicit in Bergquist's first monograph, Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886–1910 (1978), on the role of coffee exports, and Liberal Party politicians and factions connected to them, in the Thousand Days' War. As Bergquist pointed out, it was the bloodiest civil war in Latin America between the Wars of Independence and the Mexican Revolution. Coffee and Conflict was remarkable for its attempt to test dependency theory in a concrete historical and geographical setting, based on comprehensive archival research into political economy and ruling-class formation. Bergquist argued that although Liberals lost the battle, so to speak, they won the war over the shape of the country's political economy, which was liberal after 1910, as the state sought to maximize coffee exports.Since graduate school, Bergquist sought to explain the role of violence in state and class formation in agrarian and industrial capitalism, as well as the evolving relationship between the latter two in the global division of labor. His comparative focus allowed him to grasp—as none before him, and few after—the historical specificity of Colombia's modern trajectory. According to Bergquist, this consisted in the dominance of petty production in the coffee export economy, with the latter developing along liberal lines much later than the rest of the region and, paradoxically, putting down even deeper roots in liberal soil. For Bergquist, the political economy of coffee explained why populism in Colombia was stillborn. This, in turn, explained enduring post-1940s patterns of political and social conflict.Bergquist addressed these long-standing conflicts as coeditor with Gonzalo Sánchez and Ricardo Peñaranda of two timely collections of essays and primary sources: Violence in Colombia: The Contemporary Crisis in Historical Perspective (1992; first published in Spanish in 1986), and Violence in Colombia, 1990–2000: Waging War and Negotiating Peace (2001). The first grew out of an international conference held at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 1986, as peace between the Colombian government and the country's leading armed insurgencies unraveled; the second was published just as peace talks between the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the government had collapsed of their own weight. Bergquist cowrote the volume introductions and important essays using unexplored primary sources on the labor movement, property rights and coffee production, and the Thousand Days' War.Bergquist's editorial work helped bridge the gulf in funding and prestige that separates top-flight US and Canadian universities from their Colombian counterparts, bringing together specialists from different disciplines and countries. In addition to Sánchez and Peñaranda, Bergquist also worked closely with Mauricio Archila Neira, Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, Hermes Tovar Pinzón, and Medófilo Medina Pineda.As Perry Anderson observed in his 1988 review, had Labor in Latin America been about Europe, it would have found wide readership among historians and historically minded social scientists in the North Atlantic for its innovative theoretical and methodological framework, which stressed how the history of working-class formation in the export sector had shaped both state and society decisively in twentieth-century Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, and Colombia. For each, Bergquist emphasized the importance of nineteenth-century developments, especially the rise of oligarchic political systems and export economies linked to the expansion of industrial capitalism in the North Atlantic, but also of race, nationalism, and immigration. He also showed how the political organization and struggle of diverse groups of workers transformed each country in ways that no one could have predicted and that no one quite desired. He sought to identify the unintended ironies, paradoxes, and tragedies of historical and political action. Like few others, Bergquist grasped the dramatic and dynamic aspects of states and social formations in neocolonial South America.Perhaps the book's most controversial argument rests on the conceptualization of rural petty coffee producers as the Colombian working class's core. Bergquist argued that the Colombian Left never made inroads into its potentially most important constituency, and he insisted that this resulted from ideological blinders as well as ignorance about the basically conservative contours of Colombian history in the twentieth century.In other words, according to Bergquist, errors in historical perception had devastating consequences in terms of failed strategy and tactics for the Left, particularly armed struggle. This was the heart of Bergquist's critique—published in the Latin American Research Review in 1990—of Orlando Fals Borda's four-volume magnum opus, Historia doble de la costa (1979–86). Bergquist made a strong case for the democratic potential of the discipline of history, which he felt had gone unrecognized as well as unrealized. Bergquist contended that Fals Borda's textual strategy, using two columns on the same page, unwittingly widened the divisions between intellectuals and “common people” that the book sought to bridge, and that by overlooking the nineteenth century, Fals Borda had tailored his evidence to fit his ideologically driven argument. This critique formed part of a lifelong crusade against Latin American intellectuals' elitist vanguardism, influenced by the Cuban Revolution, on the one hand, and Lenin and Mao, on the other. Occupied by illusions of revolutionary leadership, according to Bergquist, intellectuals largely ignored the nuances of the history of the very people they claimed to lead.In his last book, Bergquist moved away from the primary source research that marked Labor in Latin America (even as he depended there on the secondary literature, mainly in Spanish, to construct his original interpretations for each country discussed). In Labor and the Course of American Democracy, Bergquist sought to explain the evolution of democracy, political economy, and state formation along the broad hemispheric lines later explored in Gilbert Joseph and Greg Grandin's edited volume A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War (2010) and Brian Loveman's No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776 (2010). In the field of Latin American and Caribbean history, Bergquist's book was largely ignored, as it was roughly 15 years ahead of its time. To the extent that it was overlooked by historians of the United States, it remains ahead of our time.Bergquist contended that the United States and Latin America diverged decisively in the nineteenth century: whereas in the latter basic democratic republican demands were crushed as export economies began to take off in the late nineteenth century, in the former, after the American Civil War and outside the US South, such demands were universalized to include new groups of European immigrants (excluding racialized minorities of Asian, African, Caribbean, and Latin American descent). Hence in the twentieth century, beginning with the Mexican Revolution, the fight for such demands took on a revolutionary cast in Latin America and the Caribbean, whereas in the United States, even in the 1930s, radicalism was relatively easy to contain within existing liberal lines, and organized labor was incorporated into the Cold War consensus that took shape in the late 1940s. The same was true of the civil rights, antiwar, feminist, and queer movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The divergence, according to Bergquist, stemmed from the truncated Latin American liberalism dominated by landed oligarchs, whose power within the state was never challenged as it was in the United States once the Union had defeated the Confederacy. This meant that in Latin America, popular pushes for social reform inevitably became revolutionary, pitting the US empire and its citizens against democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean through brutal counterinsurgency wars.In his defense of history as a discipline of process and context, E. P. Thompson called for a “sensibility all knobbly—all knees and elbows,” meaning that radical historical writing should jut into received notions without apology; because of this very sensibility, some of Bergquist's colleagues at Duke called him Kamikaze Chuck.1 Though he was tough-minded and sharp in his judgments—including the judgment, expressed in Labor in Latin America's introduction, that historians of Latin America should avoid following Thompson uncritically—Bergquist was unfailingly warm, gentle, and generous in person. His wide smile, and the twinkle in his eyes, disarmed all but the most guarded.After retiring, Bergquist continued to serve on doctoral dissertation committees in the United States and Colombia; he read widely on Latin America and wrote numerous book reviews. His final published essay, which appeared in 2017 in the Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, reflected on the past and future in the wake of the peace process between the FARC and the Colombian government, concluded in late 2016. It reaffirmed his earlier thesis, first outlined in Labor in Latin America, that the Colombian Left's institutionalization of armed struggle had contributed to the country's regressive historical development. The article also speculated on prospects for a broad democratic Left, which materialized to some degree in Gustavo Petro's 2018 presidential campaign (Petro won 42 percent of the vote—a historic first for the Colombian Left).However, after retirement, Bergquist mainly dedicated himself to spending time with his wife and her family in South Korea and to exploring nature in Arizona and the Southwest, as well as Washington and the Northwest, in his VW camper. Though deeply dismayed by the direction of politics and society in the twenty-first-century United States and Colombia—including the entrepreneurial careerism that swept over Latin American and Caribbean history, which, to his mind, undermined the quality of scholarship—Bergquist remained committed, upbeat, and optimistic, and the joy that he experienced and expressed later in life was contagious. In late July 2020, he died after a long hike at one of his favorite campgrounds in Washington, happy and at peace, thereby ending a most remarkable life.