Raucous cheers echoed off the high marble ceilings of the West Virginia Capitol on Tuesday as state leaders announced they had met striking teachers’ demands for a 5 percent pay raise.

“Who made history?” chanted the throng of red-clad teachers, who had defied state officials and, at times, even their own union leaders, by staging a nearly two-week walkout. “We made history!”

The strike indeed takes a place in history, and not just for the result.

Since the earliest days of teacher organizing more than a century ago, almost every moment of teacher activism has come during times of social upheaval. In 1897, the modern teachers’ union movement was born in Chicago, where teachers presided over classrooms of up to 60 children, many of whom could not speak English, in a city surging with immigrants and struggling to control rampant child labor and typhoid in the water. All for the equivalent of $13,000 a year in today’s dollars.

Later strikes came during struggles over racial inequality and the future of public school teaching itself. And as classrooms light up again across West Virginia this week, teachers will be resuming their daily struggles against two modern ills: an intractable drug crisis on top of a growing nationwide fear of bloodshed in the classroom.