The goal of this article is to describe and explain the specific strike pattern of American bituminous coal miners in the last part of the nineteenth century (between 1881 and 1894).The central thesis is that the evolution of strike patterns in bituminous coal mining differed substantially from the development of strike patterns in other industries during this period. According to scholars like Gerald Friedman (1988) and Kim Voss (1993), the evolution of the American labor movement until 1886 was strongly determined by the Knights of Labor’s strategy of inclusive unionism, which sought to increase worker power through solidarity and broad-based strikes. As this strategy proved unsuccessful—especially in 1886—American labor unions later conducted a different type of walkout: planned, small strikes of strategically located, skilled workers, which were more successful.

When social scientists enumerate the reasons behind the vast expansion of the U.S. welfare state during the New Deal, they commonly cite pressure from unemployed workers, the Keynesian ideology of Roosevelt's policy advisors, and the political compromise between southern congressionalDixiecrats and northern Democrats which enabled the programs that extended relief to the needy (Schlesinger 1958; Conkin 1967: chap. 3; Alston and Ferrie 1985; Goldfield 1989; Kimeldorf and Stepan-Norris 1992; Alston and Ferrie 1993; Quadagno 1994: 20–22; Fleck 1999a).While it is uncontroversial that the working class played some part in the formation of New Deal policy, it would seem that American farmers, particularly the mostly black southern tenantry, had little or no direct role in the distribution of federal relief.

In 1978, some 40 years after the practice of opinion polling first arrived in France, the country’s newspapers and magazines informed their readers that 76% of the French approved of Charles de Gaulle’s role in World War II, that 77% did not consider the pope’s moral instructions binding, that 83% never participated in winter sports, and that 36% thought Michel Rocard would be a good finance minister. Anyone who could not remember those findings for long might be forgiven, for they were but drops in an ocean of polling data, a tidal wave of information that swept over France each year. For many, this onslaught of polling data is deeply disturbing, given their belief that opinion polls have undermined elected representatives’ ability to use their judgment in making political decisions and have silenced other, more authentic expressions of popular opinion (for example, see Champagne 1990). Even those who welcomed les sondages d’opinion as a new means of bringing the people’s voice into arenas of power might still have felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of them published in France by that time–well over 500 in a typical year, according to one 1984 estimate–and many began to characterize the country’s apparently insatiable appetite for polls as sondomanie, or “poll mania” ( Jaffré 1985). Perhaps it was only to be expected that France, one of the pioneers in the creation of modern democracy, would be among the countriesmost interested in using polls to proclaim the will of the people to the humble and the powerful alike.

The fact that white-collar workers share relatively similar experiences of economic hardship and proletarianization across nations but develop clearly different types of trade unionism renders the theoretical relevance of formalist and economist approaches to the class location and class character of whitecollar workers questionable. According to this perspective, notwithstanding ideological and logical variants, social class reflects an occupational conglomerate, and class constituents' consciousness, disposition, and action are determined by their position in the social structure. Analysis of social class becomes a simple task of filling empty strata with workers and debate centers on the demarcation lines within the occupational structure, generating theories of class structure without attention to class agents (Bourdieu 1984). By contrast, historico-cultural, ethnographic approaches to social class, pioneered by E. P. Thompson's monumental work in 1963, turn formalist, economist theories on their head by bringing class agents back in. The process by which workers become class members is considered complex, contingent, and relational: lifestyles, dispositions, modes of collective action, and political orientations blend at a historical juncture in such a way that a class character substantially distinct and sustained enough forms and becomes an important dimension of social structure.

Social policy that emerged from the New Deal era continues to shape race relations and politics today. Since the 1930s, scholars have debated the net effect of the New Deal on racial inequality. On the one hand, the social policies of the 1930s are viewed as a great step toward a racially inclusive society (Myrdal 1944; Wolters 1975; Sitkoff 1978, 1985; Ezell 1975; Patterson 1986; Weiss 1983). In contrast to previous eras and political regimes,Roosevelt's New Deal reflected a qualitatively different sense of government's responsibility toward its citizens, including African Americans. Alternatively, New Deal era social policy is considered a crucial component in the structure of American racial stratification (Lewis 1982; Rose 1993; Quadagno 1994; Valocchi 1994; Brown 1999).The legislative record of the New Deal was consistently racialized and discriminatory.Welfare policy, in particular, actively excluded and subjugated blacks. These contrasting portrayals reflect the ambiguity of the New Deal legacy of race relations.

Sometime during World War I,Ned Cobb, an African American sharecropper better known to us by his pseudonym Nate Shaw, journeyed from the Tallapoosa County, Alabama, farm where he was sharecropping to Opelika, a small market town about 12 miles away, to buy cotton seed hulls for his mules,meal for his family, and shoes for his children. At Mr. Sadler’s general store, Cobb had a chilling encounter with one Henry Chase, a crippled white store clerk. Chase, resentful that Cobb had been served by one of the store's white female clerks, tried to provoke a fight with Cobb and then accused Cobb of threatening him with a pistol. Cobb wisely refused to be goaded, but he was arrested anyway when Chase brought his complaint to the sheriff. Cobb only escaped trouble with the law and more trouble with Chase and his gang because of the intercession of influential white merchants who knew Cobb from earlier business in town (Rosengarten 1974: 162–72).

Many scholars have noted the theoretical importance of remarriage in twentieth-century American life (Burch 1995; Cherlin 1998; Furstenberg 1980; Glick 1980; Thornton 1977; Uhlenberg and Chew 1986), yet few historical studies have examined remarriage in the United States empirically. This gap in the literature is noteworthy for two reasons. First, the turn of the twentieth century seems to have marked a crossover in the remarriage transition of the United States, reflecting changes in the pool of persons eligible to remarry. This transition was characterized by decreases in remarriage resulting from declines in mortality and the probability of widow(er)hood, followed by increases in remarriage resulting from higher divorce rates. The crossover in the transition was likely to have occurred when the pool of eligibles was at or near its nadir. Second, there is ongoing debate about the implications of remarriage for families and individuals (Booth and Dunn 1994), and about the impacts of remarriage on family functions (Cherlin 1978; Cherlin and Furstenberg 1994). In the light of these considerations, we believe it is important to examine remarriage and its consequences in the United States at the turn of the century so that we may better understand the ways that remarriage influences family life and shapes the life course of persons within families (see London and Elman 2001).