In the wake of the Russian Revolution, labor radicals believed that they had discovered the ideal organizational form: internationally affiliated parties of professional revolutionaries to coordinate the activities of national trade unions and mass political parties toward revolutionary ends. Communist “vanguard” parties proved capable of mobilizing masses but also of imposing dictatorial control over entire labor movements and for decades defended Joseph Stalin's hecatombs. Many of today's labor militants have ransacked the contemporary political scene for alternative methods of bringing unions into mass politics. The provocative and important collection edited by Ronaldo Munck and Peter Waterman argues that labor radicals should emulate social movements such as the peace, environmental, and feminist movements.

To create a festschrift in honor of a scholar as important as Charles Tilly is a daunting task. To their credit, the editors and authors of Challenging Authority successfully provide a thoughtful and particularly readable glimpse into both the past and the future of the study of contentious politics, a field in which Tilly's contributions have been undeniably crucial. From more traditional interpretations of Tilly's work to innovations in chapters by Kim Voss and Marc W. Steinberg, this volume displays the wide array of applications and insights provided by the political process model for studying collective action, whether in medieval Spain or 1989 China. However, the volume moves only in fits and starts toward the new “relational structuralism” (xix) that the editors herald as coalescing around the study of collective action.

This clearly written, well-researched monograph analyzes the shop-floor actions, strikes, and general insurgency of German chemical workers during and after World War One, proving, once again, that reports of labor history's demise are premature. Patton's work suggests that we still have much to learn from an anatomy of militant working-class behavior. In the classic manner, Flammable Material surveys the overall economic and industrial context of rebellion while also offering a detailed comparative study of conditions, organization, and activity in specific companies—in this case, the four biggest concerns, Bayer, Höchst, Leuna, and BASF. Simultaneously, the book moves beyond traditional labor history (at least of the dominant German variety) by adopting the perspective “from below” as opposed to from inside trade unions and socialist parties. Moreover, Patton criticizes assumptions that often crop up even in the field of the new labor history. Indeed, his study was motivated by his dissatisfaction with explanations of the oft-noted volatility of chemical workers from 1918 to 1921. He challenges, first, the notion that their actions were “wild” or spontaneous, showing that they were driven by long-festering, well-articulated grievances and steered by shop-floor leaders and organizations. He disputes, second, the assumption that chemical workers were apolitical. To understand both the curve and content of workplace solidarity and militancy, he argues, the historian must consider the impact of partisan politics on chemical workers, on the one hand, and their intense concern with the balance of power between employees and management, on the other.

This is an invaluable volume, expanding Latin American women's and labor history in important thematic, methodological, and theoretical directions. The authors explore the lives, struggles, and consciousness of urban working women in Brazil, the Southern Cone, Guatemala, and Colombia. By and large, the essays develop a nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender and class in twentieth-century Latin America. They incorporate postmodern approaches to historical analysis as well as the classic concerns of labor history with material conditions, social relations, and working-class political consciousness. The contributors examine the multiple meanings of discourse and popular culture while insisting that it is indeed possible to recapture women's experience in some measure. They generally move beyond the dichotomy of celebrating women's heroism and denouncing sexism, instead showing how solidarity between laboring women and men could be intimately interwoven with male domination. Finally, several of the authors employ oral history in sophisticated ways, demonstrating that how a story is told can be just as important in shaping our understanding of history as the empirical detail it may seem to offer us.

Judith Stein recounts two histories in tandem that all too frequently are narrated separately: “that of a changing [American] economy and that of changing race relations” (2). The brilliant originality of Running Steel is to bring the history of civil rights in employment together with larger questions of national, indeed international, post-1945 political economy. The struggle for racial justice appears neither a beneficiary nor a casualty of an easily invoked but vaguely defined “liberalism,” as in so many other studies. Instead, the limits of fair employment prove an integral part of the making and unmaking of a political and economic totality with quite specific elements seemingly unconnected to race relations. In contrast to currently fashionable neoliberal accounts, Stein concludes “it was the foreign commitments and economic policies of liberalism, not the excesses of racial reformers or the racism of the culture, that transformed American politics in the postwar era” (6).

Ever since its birth as a nation, America has contrasted itself to the image of Europe. Intellectuals from both sides of the Atlantic have contributed to the myth of the New World and tried to express the essence of America's “exceptionalism.”

When labor historians construct lists of the ten most important strikes in United States history, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers' (PATCO) strike of August 1981 is certain to claim a prominent spot. Many labor activists and scholars of the contemporary labor movement see Ronald Reagan's firing of more than eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers as a sort of fall from grace, the beginning of the decline of the labor movement. To be sure, there are others who would disagree with them, but all would concur that this strike was of major historic significance. Therefore, it is surprising that this is the first book-length scholarly treatment of the strike. The author, Willis Nordlund, is Dean of the School of Business at the College of West Virginia, a veteran United States Department of Labor staff person, and a multiengine, instrument-rated pilot. Silent Skies bears the imprint of his background.

Beginning with the surge of interest in slavery a generation ago, the South has steadily emerged as an integral part of America's labor past. From the mid-1970s into the early 1990s, attention flowed chiefly to the period from Reconstruction through World War One. And pathbreaking studies continue to appear on the women and men, white and black, who worked the farms, homes, docks, mines, forests, craft-shops, railroads, factories, and service trades of the New South. Lately, though, the frontier of research has shifted to the eras of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), World War Two, the early Cold War, and the civil rights movement—a chapter of Southern labor history once left to journalists, activists, and social scientists. Southern Labor in Transition, 1940–1995, edited by Robert H. Zieger, offers a valuable road map of current scholarship.

Marching Together uses gender as a category of analysis along with race and class to reinterpret the history of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters from its inception in 1925 until the mid-1950s. Chateauvert skillfully accomplishes four goals. First, she provides a detailed account of the individual and organizational contributions of porters' wives to building the Brotherhood in local communities, belying the union's legendary account of courageous men of color battling a racist labor movement and exploitative corporations on their own. Second, she provides an analysis of the gender norms that governed the Brotherhood's organization and policies. Third, Chateauvert provides a critique of the union's treatment of women porters. Fourth, she provides a portrait of the civil rights activism of the Brotherhood and its Ladies' Auxiliary between 1941 and 1956. Based on a wealth of archival and published sources, Marching Together provides a multifaceted and sophisticated analysis of the way that gender norms and customary practices operated among Northern working-class African Americans.

The concept of American exceptionalism has been with us for a long time. The abundance of books and articles on the subject represents a vigorous cottage industry. This collection of essays is a welcome addition to the historiography but, as with its forbears, the issue remains a tricky if not a treacherous animal to grasp. As Halpern and Morris point out in their introductory chapter, “The Persistence of Exceptionalism,” the concept is a “corpse that continually springs to life” (1). These essays “spring to life” from the celebrated annual Commonwealth Conference at the University of London.

Few episodes in North American working-class history have attracted as much attention as the rise and fall of the Molly Maguires. The term refers to a secret movement of Irish miners who employed threats and violence in confronting their adversaries in the anthracite coal fields in the decade after the US Civil War. Most interpretations have been ideologically charged and focused mainly on the violence itself, beginning with sensational newspaper accounts and Alan Pinkerton's own book based on information from his operative James McParland who infiltrated the movement. At least one study, J. Walter Coleman's The Molly Maguire Riots (Richmond, 1936), showed a healthy skepticism for McParland's biased sources—Pinkerton and others who were more interested in hanging the Molly Maguires than in understanding them. In The Molly Maguires (New York, 1983 [1964]), however, Wayne Broehl, Jr., developed the more typical view that the Mollies were terrorists and the Pinkertons heroes. Though he handled the evidence less critically than Coleman, it is Broehl's account that has been viewed as the standard, perhaps the definitive account for more than a generation. With all this work and much more, why do we need another study of the Molly Maguires and what is it that makes Kevin Kenny's by far the most valuable treatment of them?

Very well-researched and well-written, this book provides an excellent discussion of the activities of federal surveillance agencies in the Pittsburgh mill district (western Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia, and eastern Ohio). However, Seeing Reds is neither about surveillance agencies nor the Pittsburgh Left per se, but rather about their intersection: the “federal government's effort to define, understand, and suppress leftists” during the period of World War One. It begins with an excellent survey of the early history of federal surveillance agencies, including the Bureau of Investigation (BI), the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Military Intelligence Division, and the American Protective League. McCormick pays special attention to the BI, the original name of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He looks closely at four men who, as special agents in the Pittsburgh Field Office, played a particularly important part in his story. Each had a background in either police and/or private investigative work or a college degree and/or legal training.

This book examines the construction of middle-class identity in the twentieth-century United States through a focus on social workers. Much of the description of class formation in this book derives from glimpses at the experiences of Jewish social workers in New York City. For these social workers, class identity vacillated between proletarianism and professionalism, between working class and middle class.

Gender studies in history are at an intriguing point in their evolution. Having distinguished themselves from traditional historiography through a marked emphasis on language as the primary construction site of power relations, they have created a number of principal research tasks. One involves the retelling of history from the perspective of gender relations. A second consists of a description of the relationship between gender dynamics and those of other categories of identification, such as class and ethnicity. A third is the move from the “how” of the construction of gendered power relations to their “why.” In other words, it is the move from description to explanation. Despite a number of attempts to undertake the second and third tasks, this monograph by Mercedes Steedman most clearly presents itself as a gendered retelling of the history of the Canadian clothing industry, and it is in this light that it should be appreciated.

In Labor and the Wartime State, James Atleson examines “labor regulation during World War II and its subsequent effect on postwar labor relations and, especially, labor law” (1). In so doing, Atleson seeks to provide a corrective to existing labor history in which “the dawn of the postwar period is often perceived as unaffected by the war yet somehow quite different from the prewar era.” This paradox of the “unimportant war” is not restricted to labor history, and Atleson's focus on the war can and should become a model for other scholars.

For much of the first half of the century the United Mine Workers (UMW) was the largest, most important, most powerful, and most progressive union in the United States. Among its many accomplishments was that it was one of the first to bargain for and win employer-financed health benefits. Health care was critically important to miners, many of whom were seriously injured on the job and by middle age were often disabled by black lung disease. In the isolated, rural mine patches, quality health care was rarely available. In the days before the organization of the UMW's Welfare and Retirement Funds, many miners found that the only health care that was available came from the company doctor. This medical practice was usually substandard and was one of the many ways the operators exercised power over the life of the miners, discouraging union and political organizing.