Philosophies circle was the first group to present a coherent Hegelian Marxist–Leninism in France. Their approach to philosophy, urban and industrial sociology, psychology, political economy, poetry, fiction, and literary criticism was akin to the far better known Frankfurt School. There were six key figures in the group who founded La Revue Marxiste, the apex of their mutual endeavors, in 1929: Georges Friedmann, Norbert Guterman, Henri Lefebvre, Pierre Morhange, Paul Nizan, and Georges Politzer. Bud Burkhard makes a major contribution by writing the first intellectual history of this équipe, discussing how these young men reconceptualized Marxism as a response to the crise de l'esprit that followed in the wake of World War One in France. Burkhard examines how they became Marxists and situates the cadre within the wider French and European intellectual and political currents between the wars. He addresses the postwar cultural crisis and its transformation in the 1930s, the formation and politicization of the Philosophies circle, the influence of German Idealism, the creation and dissipation of La Revue Marxiste, with focused chapters on Politzer, Friedmann, and Lefebvre, and an epilogue that outlines each intellectual's activities from World War Two to the end of their lives.

These impressive companion volumes developed out of a conference organized by the editors at the University of Warwick in 1997. Drawing upon the expertise provided by distinguished contributors from industrial journalism and across the social sciences, the books comprise twenty-two essays which cover a wide range and depth of topics concerning trade unionism, workplace and “official” trade union politics in Britain between the end of World War Two, and the advent of Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979.

This is, quite simply, a remarkable book. By setting out evidence of the power of reading and thinking among people who worked against odds to do so, Rose has written a moving tribute to the inquisitive imperative lodged in human minds. Rose charts the efflorescence of an autodidact culture, which reached its summation in the decades around World War One. His interests, however, are wider than that story suggests. Other historians have chronicled heroic struggles against adversity in selected working-class autobiographies, but Rose instead trains his lens on the inner life generated by reading, documented in literally hundreds of accounts: alongside first-hand narratives, some of them familiar to labor historians, he has examined library and school records, surveys, and newspaper accounts of the same subject. His ambit extends beyond working-class people to include the printed and aural material they ingested, along with publishing history (including the history of Dent's Everyman's Library), musical culture, the transmission of sex education, adult education, and Ruskin College. This is a book about “culture” in the widest, Arnoldian sense, and it is triumphant in its breadth and achievement.

The most recent sixty years of Italian history showcase many unusual features with regard to the development of the European Left. Italy's resistance movement was the most powerful and radical antifascist opposition west of a line from the Adriatic to the Baltic Sea. Its postwar Communist Party (PCI) was the largest organization of its kind west of the Iron Curtain. And, in Italy too, the social movements generated in the course of “1968” produced a far left which was far more socially implanted and long lasting than anywhere else. Small wonder, then, that it was Italian society that literally “produced” the most widely acclaimed left-wing theater director, playwright, and actor in all of postwar Europe: Dario Fo.

The waves of structural adjustment programs and democratic transitions that swept across Africa during the late 1980s and early 1990s have once again renewed interest in the role of ordinary people in the economic and political transformation of their country. Echoing the spirit of the classic revolutions of the West and most recently the great transformations in East and Central Europe, Thomas Bassett challenges contemporary discourses on African development that see the peasants as passive participants in the development process of their country. To the contrary, the peasants of Côte d'Ivoire proved to be independent partners, albeit oppressed, in the development of cotton in the country.

These are boom times for social histories of Mexico City's working people. Within the past decade, nearly a dozen major studies have appeared in the United States and Mexico exploring the nineteenth- and twentieth-century worlds of artisans, workers, prostitutes, and other members of the urban “dangerous classes.” This new generation of scholarship has moved the study of Mexican working people's history away from its timeworn emphasis on the official politics of labor unions and the concomitant institutional analysis of inter-union alliances, schisms, and pact making with the state. Instead, the recent work has begun to sketch in a portrait of the everyday lives, political struggles, and cultural perspectives of the unionized and nonunionized popular classes in Mexico's capital. John Lear's history of Mexico City's working people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represents a major contribution to this literature, thanks in part to its chronological breadth and ambitious scope.

ldquo;Me./Just me. Willful/woman. As much have I of life/as I asked for.” These are the words of Cuban writer Georgina Herrera (quoted in Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century, 141). They are words that have as much to do with a female meatpacking worker in Peronist Argentina, as they do with a poor black woman in twentieth-century Cuba. They are words that describe well the lives of Maria and Reyita, the narrators of their own histories in Daniel James' Doña Maria's Story: Life History, Memory and Political Identity and Maria de los Reyes Castillo Bueno's Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century, as told to her daughter Daisy Rubiera Castillo.

Ever so often there are individuals who, if they have the good fortune to live long enough, can be witnesses to and participants in major historical passages. Such is the case of the ninety-three year old (at the time of this writing) African American labor activist and pan-Africanist, Maida Springer. If Springer's name is not well known outside those circles, Yevette Richards's most informative biography will go a long way toward rectifying the oversight.

Michael Miller Topp's Those Without a Country details the history of a generation of Italian–American syndicalists–leftists who advocated “revolution achieved through increasingly confrontational strikes waged by militant unions” (1) from the turn of the century to the late-1920s trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Drawing primarily on left-wing Italian-language newspapers, some Italian state archival materials, and a range of secondary sources in Italian and English, Topp focuses on several themes: the transnational nature of Italian-American syndicalists' ideas, institutions, and strategies; the complex interplay between syndicalists' masculinist, working-class, and Italian identities; and the significance this admittedly small number of syndicalists had on immigrant communities in the United States, on foreign policy in Italy, and on the Left in both.

Greg Hall's probing study of migrant agricultural workers in the Far West and Great Plains of the early twentieth century sheds important light on a neglected but important contingent of labor radicals who joined and sustained the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Although we most often associate the IWW with logging and lumbering, mining, and marine transportation, Hall explains how a distinctive work culture united tens of thousands of migrant farm workers from the wheat fields of Kansas to the fruit and vegetable orchards of Washington and California. Despite intense state repression of the IWW during World War One, these harvest wobblies of the Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union (AWIU) led a resurgence of the IWW in the 1920s before internal divisions within the IWW and critical changes in the worklife culture and technology of agriculture led to the ultimate demise of the industrial union among migrant farm workers.

While there are many histories of unions in the United States, there are relatively few studies of employer associations and their role in industrial relations. Howell John Harris's recent study of the Metal Manufacturers Association of Philadelphia, Bloodless Victories: The Rise and Fall of the Open Shop in the Philadelphia Metal Trades, 1890–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), stresses the importance of values in shaping employer behavior. William Millikan's meticulous history of the Minneapolis Citizens Alliance likewise demonstrates the importance of ideas as well as interests in business approaches toward industrial relations. The Minneapolis employers, however, embraced a tougher brand of anti-unionism than Harris found in Philadelphia.

When New York's World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, the reverberations of the attack highlighted the city's enormous importance to the nation's economic, political, cultural, and social life. How New York City came to function as both the symbolic and actual “capitol” of American capital is a story that has been researched and written about from many different angles. Good history always contains one or both of two elements: either a corrective to accepted historical knowledge or the filling of a void in the historical record. Sven Beckert attempts both elements and succeeds. Beckert fills the historical void with a comprehensive analysis of the formation of a diverse urban merchant and industrial sector into a class, the bourgeoisie of the title. His goal is to provide “an adequate study of the political attitudes of northern industrialists” (11). He provides his corrective by showing how this class coalesced around social and cultural issues, avoiding a purely economic explanation. While steering clear of American exceptionalism, Beckert illustrates what is unique in New York's bourgeois class formation and explains its vital role in the history of the city and of the nation.

Reading Cheri Register's Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir was like a homecoming for me. I too am a Ph.D. daughter of the working-class, perpetually caught between loyalties and values forged in a union family and a middle-class adult life in which more individualistic pursuits both compel and confuse me. Like Register, I find objectivity on questions of union struggles difficult, if not impossible. But Register's intentions, and the resulting literary and historical delight of a memoir, are far more interesting than objectivity. As she observes in the opening essay of her autobiography, “I find that I still experience the world as a working-class kid away from home. I walk the line between a feisty fidelity to the people of my childhood and a refined repugnance for the work they had to do” (8). The old labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” echoes throughout her searching, poignant, and compelling reflections on working-class values, labor, and history from the perspective of a postwar working-class daughter.

John Pencavel demonstrates that co-ops are generally more productive than traditional capitalist workplaces. Pencavel, an economist, exhaustively analyzes twenty years' worth of data for approximately forty cooperative and capitalist plywood mills that represent the bulk of plywood production in the Pacific Northwest. Plywood proves an ideal laboratory for examining the comparative efficiency of worker co-ops and capitalist firms for three reasons. First, co-ops and capitalist firms have co-existed side by side in this industry for several decades. Second, the pace of technological innovation has remained relatively constant such that neither type of firm has enjoyed an advantage over the other. Third, the volatility of plywood prices makes it possible to compare the distinct ways in which co-ops and capitalist firms respond to price shocks. After proving the superior efficiency of the co-ops, however, Pencavel argues not for their growth and proliferation but rather for capitalist firms to adopt watered-down forms of “worker participation” in the interests of their own profit.

All who are interested in such diverse topics as the history of immigration to the United States, the diffusion of socialist and anarchist ideas, and the international labor movement will rejoice at the publication of Michel Cordillot's superb biographical dictionary. It makes visible social actors who have been totally ignored by scholars until recently and reveals the existence of a significant francophone social movement in the United States. It also revises and enlarges our knowledge of utopian communities, socialist and anarchist movements, illuminating especially the linkages that developed between the old and the New World. The book begins with a brief, detailed, and stimulating introduction that suggests new ways to study migration, the processes of integration, and the formation of political organizations among expatriates. Aside from tracing the history of individual lives and francophone groups, Cordillot's approach gives special priority to the constant interaction of individuals and collective organizations rather than focusing primarily on ideology, political platforms, and organizational structures.

What impact did the New Deal have at the local level? In these two volumes from the University of Illinois Press series, “The Working Class in American History,” historians Janet Irons and Cecelia Bucki use the vehicle of the case study to present detailed answers to this question. In so doing, each scholar makes a valuable contribution to our understandings of social and political change in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). Looking at parts of the South (textile mill towns in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and eastern Tennessee), Irons explores how white textile workers responded to changes in labor relations under the New Deal, a response that culminated in the failed 1934 general textile strike. In her study of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Bucki provides a sophisticated urban history, situating workers, ethnicity, class, and the economy firmly within a larger narrative of organized labor's quest for political power.

Nelson Lichtenstein is one of the most influential historians of the twentieth-century labor movement in the United States. In his most recent book, he examines the labor movement's current difficulties and prospects, bringing to bear on the discussion both his impressive historical knowledge and his own engagement in current efforts to reinvigorate the movement and to rebuild alliances between the unions and intellectuals. The book is not an analysis of the dynamics of workers' struggles or even an institutional study of the labor movement, but rather a close examination of the declining importance of the “labor question” (as it was commonly called a century ago) in the intellectual and political life of the United States since the end of the 1930s.