An objective of this collection is to bring the history of the Australian labor movement to international attention. The editors introduce the collection with a brief overview of Australian labor history, emphasizing differences between the Australian and American experiences. The introduction argues that a unique aspect of Australian labor history is “laborism,” which is defined as the central place of the labor movement in Australian culture, as compared with the more marginal position of the labor movement in America. In Australia, this centrality is reflected in the embedding of trade unions and labor in the state through wage-fixing tribunals, a social security system designed to support the families of male wage earners, and the Australian Labor Party's strong links to the trade union movement. The introduction is informative and especially benefits from the insights of David Palmer, an American historian teaching at Adelaide's Flinders University. However, the introduction was apparently written later at the suggestion of an American reader and has thus not been fully integrated into the structure of the book.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Poland, one of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's newest members and poised to enter the European Union sometime in the next few years, has begun perhaps one of its most stable periods in recent history. Divided for centuries between Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires, Poland was able to preserve its language and cultural identity until its independence in 1918. Of nations involved in the Second World War, Poland was perhaps the most thoroughly devastated by that conflict, emerging only to be locked under the strict gaze of Moscow until the beginning of the last decade. In the wake of 1989 and the opening of borders and archives across Central and Eastern Europe, the experience of Poland has much to teach us.

In the 1940s, under the combined impact of war, occupation, liberation, and cold war, a series of new departures in the realm of theology, party politics and apostolic missions left a profound imprint on European Catholicism. One of the products of this period of ebullience in European Catholicism was “Christian progressivism,” a tendency arising among the multiple branches of a fledgling Left Catholicism, then in its prime. Christian progressivism emerged out of the creative confluence of Catholic social movements and the communist experience. Nowhere in Western Europe was this phenomenon as prominent as in France.

As the European population grew after 1100 CE, bishops and princes in the thinly settled regions northeast of what we now call Germany took to generating revenue and labor power by recruiting qualified migrants to newly chartered cities and villages. Often the charters granted access to German law rather than the Slavic or Scandinavian codes and practices that had previously prevailed. German law afforded both merchants and peasants greater individual freedom and more secure claims to property than did earlier legal arrangements. Soon German-speaking cities such as Danzig and Riga were booming as crossroads in the exchange of northern goods for the manufactures of Central and Western Europe. In their hinterlands, German-speaking farmers intensified cultivation and shipped agricultural products to centers of international trade. Fairly soon, however, strengthened coercive monarchies and mercantile federations such as the Hanse extracted revenues and exerted top-down controls that increased inequality between insiders and outsiders of the newly expanding political economy. We might call the whole process Europeanization. Within Europeanization, however, what caused what? How did German law, semi-autonomous cities, intensive farming, exclusive trading federations, developmental states, and proliferating markets interact? Decades of vigorous, often vitriolic, debate among historians have not yet produced a clear-cut victory for the view that well- articulated markets did the crucial work, for the riposte that new forms of force-backed exploitation caused the transformation, or for any alternative to those competing explanations.

This bibliography is quite an impressive effort. It is extensive, thorough, structurally sound, and contains excellent indexes. In short, it is a truly useful tool for anyone who, for scholarly or political reasons, takes an interest in Trotsky and Trotskyism. Of course, the definition of Trotskyism is somewhat blurred; too many people have used the concept subjectively, either with positive or negative connotations, for it to signify anything unambiguous. The Lubitzes have done their utmost to remedy this state of affairs by disregarding sectarian restraints and by choosing a broad approach to the subject; they have even gone to the extreme of including some anti-Trotskyist effusions of no real scholarly or current political value.

This study of urban labor in Pernambuco draws on the author's experience in the 1980s and early 1990s as a trade union lawyer and legal advisor to the leftist trade union confederation Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) (161). Formed in 1983, the CUT is the institutional expression of the New Unionism identified with Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, founder of a new Workers' Party (PT) in 1979.

Covington Hall was a lifelong labor activist and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Hall edited labor newspapers and was a contributor to socialist and labor movement publications including the Industrial Worker, the One Big Union Monthly, and the original International Socialist Review. For years, his unpublished manuscript on Southern labor, a work that is both history and memoir, has been a resource for historians of labor in and near Louisiana. Now it is widely available, with an introduction by David Roediger. Hall tells a lively story about key movements in Louisiana labor history from the 1880s to 1914, but he is not always able to capture or explain the broad sweep of events. And the introduction by David Roediger does less than it should, offering little analysis of the unions Hall will describe or of the social settings in which they operated. Oddly, Roediger does not take the opportunity to apply his theories on “the wages of whiteness” to Hall's text; perhaps this is because New Orleans white workers don't seem to be receiving them. Hall himself deals with issues of race and unionism as they arise in particular situations, but not as themes in southern or American labor history.

Howell J. Harris has written an important book that should spark much discussion among historians of labor, who in their rush from institutional history have all but abandoned the history of labor relations. He is one of only a handful of scholars who have studied the history of modern labor relations systems. And a careful reading of Bloodless Victories shows what labor historians have been missing.

Kimberley Phillips adds a fine study of African-Americans' northward migration, community development, and working-class formation to a series of similar works published in the 1980s and 1990s. Alabama North opens new reaches of African-Americans' early twentieth century experience in both North and South, but especially in Cleveland, a major industrial city and significant destination for Southern black migrants. We have known most about the city's African-American community at this time from the landmark study of ghetto development by Ken Kusmer, published in 1976. Like the more recent field of research which has examined black migration and migrants in Northern industrial cities, Phillips focuses her study not on the spatial and social aspects of African-Americans' increasingly segregated community but on the racial, class, and gender dynamics that produced a particular form of community in Cleveland.

This article surveys the evolution of labor history writing as an increasingly vibrant subfield of Ottoman history. It addresses labor historians outside of Ottoman history and for their benefit traces why and how workers almost completely were left out of Ottoman historical writing until c. 1970. Thereafter, Ottoman historians have more frequently discussed workers and their histories. At first focusing on organized workers and their relations with the state, these writings then shifted to labor in action. Thus, Ottoman labor history writing paralleled, in many respects, that of other fields of history. More recently, attention has been given to non-guild, non-union labor—including women and children—and its activities in the workplace.