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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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Jan 13, 2021 · From the story of hard work and the working man overcoming the cold unfeeling steel of machinery; to its bitter history of exploiting marginalized people and infrastructure built on the bodies of...
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.
