This fascinating and important book covers the revolutionary resistance to the rise of capitalism around the Atlantic basin, including North and Central America, Great Britain, Ireland, Western Europe and Western Africa in the years from the English Revolution (in the 1640s) to shortly after the French and Haitian Revolutions (in the early 1800s). It is based on extensive research in contemporary documents and publications, assisted by the use of modern studies of the events and struggles that form the content of the book. Sailors of various races and nationalities are an essential ingredient of this study, partly as an example of the brutal oppression of working seamen, but more importantly as an example of the continuing resistance to that oppression. Some Forms of that resistance included mutinies on both merchant and naval vessels and the development of a more democratic structure and culture in piracy. However, more than these direct struggles, there is the crucial part that seamen played in the spread of knowledge of revolutionary struggles, assuring that these struggles would become international. One example was noted by David Montgomery in an article published in the March 2001 Journal of American History. He cites the case of David Walker, a used clothing salesman frequented by sailors, who often sewed copies of his Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World in the pockets or lining of jackets so that they were carried to ports around the world. Editor's note: Martin Glaberman, a contributor to ILWCH, passed away in December 2001. His career as a labor activist, educator, and author spanned more than sixty years and his love for storytelling and great sense of humor made him an invaluable transmitter of labor lore across generations. We will miss him and feel privileged to have had him as a collaborator. MPH

For nearly a century, scholars, politicians, and social service workers in the United States have attributed high levels of poverty among Puerto Ricans, on both the island and the North American mainland, to deficiencies in the behavior, beliefs, and values of the Puerto Rican people. Carmen Teresa Whalen presents an exhaustively researched and carefully argued rebuttal to these “culture of poverty” arguments in From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Farm Workers and Postwar Economies.

In the British parliamentary election of 1900, the nascent Labour Representation Committee (LRC), born a mere six months before from the union of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) with three small socialist bodies (the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Fabian Society), contested fifteen seats, polled two percent of the votes cast, and returned two of its candidates to a House of Commons of 670 members. In 1997, in the last general election of the twentieth century, the Labour Party, as the LRC had become in 1906, ran 639 candidates, won 43.2 percent of the vote, and, with 418 Members of Parliament (MPs), commanded an impregnable majority in the Commons. Four years later, the electorate confirmed Labour in its mandate, again with an invulnerable parliamentary majority. At the end of its first century, Labour had come to appear Britain's natural party of government, and its principal foe, the Conservative Party, a wanderer in the wilderness of internecine conflict and impotent opposition.

Let's begin with the mythological allusion in the title The Flight of Icarus. Its inspiration comes from a translation into Castilian of a seventeenth-century Catalan personal chronicle by a tanner from Barcelona named Miquel Parets. The relevant passage reads as follows: “may this worthy ambition serve as a sun to illuminate my endeavors, rather than to cause me to plummet like Icarus . . . even though destiny assigned me to a lowlier sphere, it did not rob me of the wish to aspire to higher things.” (1, 164) According to Amelang, the Icarus myth was one of many classical models that informed the writing and self-images of early modern Europeans of humble as well as more exalted origins. His interpretation suggests that the anonymous translator (as well as the original author himself) understood artisan writing to be a bold, even transgressive, act that challenged social and cultural boundaries. The Icarus myth, then, in this and related usages, serves as an ambiguous class allegory: either as a morality tale about the just punishment for pride, or as an exhortation to attempt ascent, and delivery from the labyrinth, even in the face of overwhelming odds.

Until the 1980s, historians of Soviet Russia could be divided into those who subscribed to the totalitarian theory of Soviet history and those who subscribed to a more nuanced view. In his landmark book, Origins of the Great Purges (Cambridge, 1985), J. Arch Getty single-handedly split Russian historians into two new camps: those who were horrified by Getty's work and those who were not. At the root of the controversy was Getty's provocative challenge that historians “rethink Stalinism,” taking into account that one man could in no way be solely responsible for the Terror of the 1930s. Getty turned his attention to provincial party officials, documenting the way the purges assumed their own momentum away from Moscow. In so doing, he seemed to minimize Stalin's role and, according to his critics, Stalin's culpability.

This is not the book for which Eric Hobsbawm will be remembered. Readers of his many historical works will know better than to regard it as “a concise summary of the thinking of one of the century's preeminent historians,” as the flyleaf claims. But if you ever wondered about the intellectual fit between this brilliant historical talent and his erstwhile Stalinist “socialism,” this book may provide some answers.

With so many studies of the New Deal, it is difficult to imagine anyone saying something new about this critical period in American politics, yet Suzanne Mettler has managed to do so. Bringing the gender biases of social policy boldly into the foreground, Mettler retells the story of the formation and implementation of New Deal social policies from a fresh perspective. Surpassing prior studies that concentrate on the gendered notions of the policymakers (such as the assumption of a male breadwinner), Mettler reveals how ostensibly gender neutral debates concerning policy design produced gendered outcomes nevertheless. In particular, Mettler demonstrates that New Deal policies consigned citizens to the governance of either national or state authorities on the basis of gender and points out the fundamental significance of this split. Whereas white male wage earners benefited from the national administration of uniform social policies, most women and minority men were indirectly excluded from these national policies and left under the jurisdiction of parochial and illiberal state governments, thereby dividing citizens. Instead of treating women as independent and rights-bearing citizens, state-administered programs treated beneficiaries as needing “supervision and protection” through a variety of invasive regulations. Incorporating women into the polity at the level of state government, Mettler contends, produced a distinctly inferior form of citizenship. To demonstrate her argument, Mettler presents a rich historical description of the enactment and implementation of Old Age Insurance (OAI), Old Age Assistance (OAA), Unemployment Insurance (UI), Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA).

In what still remains something of a desert, every oasis is to be viewed with relief. In this particular wilderness, however, we also need maps, signposts, and travelers' guides. Michael Gordon and Lowell Turner provide us with a number of original and valuable case studies of union internationalism, and these justify the book's place on the so-far meager collection of such efforts (Carew et. al. 2000, Waterman & Wills 2001 a, b). Nevertheless, the study lacks an editorial orientation sufficiently historical, relevantly theoretical or broad enough in its view of the terrain. Readers are likely to feel themselves better informed, but suspicious they are being left without the necessary large-scale map or trusty compass they need to navigate the field. Allow me to consider what's missing.

Labor historians have always been better at explaining what should have been than what was. This problem plagues Paul Buhle's Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland and the Tragedy of American Labor. No one familiar with Dr. Buhle's work—his detailed treatments of socialist radicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—will be surprised by the conclusions of his most recent work. The leadership of the mainstream organized labor movement always has been an anathema to the far left, and Buhle attacks Samuel Gompers, George Meany, and Lane Kirkland with a vengeance for having undermined true social democracy in favor of personal gain and corporate accommodation with employers and the state. These themes already have received significant development from the likes of Nelson Lichtenstein, Kim Moody, and Michael Goldfield. Relying almost entirely on secondary sources, Buhle has little to add to previous treatments, although he does focus more closely on the issue of racial exclusion. Ultimately, he breaks new ground only in the passion and uncompromising nature of his criticism. Buhle spares no hyperbole in assaulting the three “over-fed fat cats”—Gompers is a “doddering conservative,” Meany as a young man was “neither conspicuously bright or mechanically talented,” and Kirkland, is “a colorless functionary.” The author's aim clearly is to denounce rather than to understand.

They were right! Samuel Gompers really did deserve the rancor that Progressives, Socialists, and proponents of a labor party heaped upon him for more than three decades. Throughout the critical formative period of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), he stamped his own personal vision upon, and placed his own personal interests ahead of the interests of the American working-class. Furthermore, after reading Julie Greene's thorough debunking of the AFL's political strategies, it will be increasingly difficult to argue that Gompers even advanced the interests of that narrow band of white, male trade unionists with much success. What happened to the immigrant trade unionist who showed such a remarkable understanding of the problems confronting the working-class when he testified before Congress in 1883?