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John Henry is an American folk hero. An African American freedman, he is said to have worked as a "steel-driving man"—a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into a rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock in constructing a railroad tunnel.
John William Henry II (born September 13, 1949) [2] is an American businessman and the founder of John W. Henry & Company, an investment management firm. He is the principal owner of Liverpool Football Club, the Boston Red Sox, the Pittsburgh Penguins, The Boston Globe, and co-owner of RFK Racing.
May 13, 2024 · John Henry, hero of a widely sung African American folk ballad. It describes his contest with a steam drill, in which John Henry crushed more rock than did the machine but died “with his hammer in his hand.”
Folklorists have long thought John Henry to be mythical, but historian Scott Nelson has discovered that he was a real person—a nineteen-year-old from New Jersey who was convicted of theft in a Virginia court in 1866, sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary, and put to work building the C&O Railroad.
John Henryism (or simply JH) is the act of responding to prolonged stresses’ at work, in daily life, or from social discrimination’ by expending higher and higher levels of effort to resolve an issue or improve one’s lot, until the stresses result in physical or psychological illness.
John Henry was known as the strongest, the fastest, and the most powerful man working on the railroad. He went up against the steam drill to prove that the black worker could drill a hole through the rock farther and faster than the drill could.
Dec 9, 2020 · As a Black American folk hero, John Henry became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement, and even today his story's universal themes resonate, as the automation of work and the ubiquity of technology raise questions about the value of human labor and what is inevitably lost with the march of technological progress.
Sep 28, 2013 · This ballad tells the story of John Henry, an American folk hero. According to legend, he was the strongest and fastest railroad workers in his day during the post-Civil War era.
He was born a slave in the 1840's but was freed after the war. He went to work as a steel-driver for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, don't ya know. And John Henry was the strongest, the most powerful man working the rails.
Sep 2, 2002 · John Henry's been called America's 'most authentic working people's hero.' The legendary hammer-slinging laborer who beat a steam drill in a tunnel-digging race has been...
