On November 20, 1997 labor historians from several European countries and North America gathered for a three-day colloquium in Roubaix, France to discuss their research on skilled European workers from the sixteenth through the twentieth century. The location was quite fitting; Roubaix is located in the northeast corner of France near the Belgian border. From the sixteenth century on the textile, coal, and later steel industries further to the south in Lorraine, made this one of Europe's most important industrial regions. Today it is one of Western Europe's most de-industrialized regions. The call for papers published in both French and English explicitly cites unemployment and industrial decline at the dawn of the twenty-first century among the reasons to study industrial skill over the last four centuries. This fine collection of eighteen articles (fourteen in French and four in English) and a brief introduction by the editors is the fruit of that gathering. Individual papers explore how skill intersected with patterns of labor migration, the ongoing process of skill formation and construction, and labor markets. Taken together, the papers offer a rich base of comparison across time and space. Unfortunately, limited space prevents discussion here of all of the contributions.

In quoting from a contemporary observer who noted that by virtue of their very nature it is “a small distance (that) women must travel to become nurses,” (145) Katrin Schultheiss sets up the main argument she advances in her analysis of the French politics of the professionalization of nursing in the Third Republic. In her discussion of the competing discourses of modernization, secularization, labor militancy, and feminization, which combined in intricate if at times oppositional ways to shape and inform the debate on women's place in public medicine and nursing, Schultheiss cautions against simple explanations and narrative arcs. This, the reader is told, is not simply the story of women's search for political recognition within the masculine public sphere; instead, it is one that outlines women's multi-pronged struggle for standardized training and professional status during the fin-de-siecle period. But the history and politics surrounding nursing's emergence at this time is bound up with other themes common to this period, from the rise of working-class consciousness among public workers, to the modernization of medicine as a discipline, and Church-state conflict. In viewing the micro and macro-level debates which enveloped nurses as a symptom of France's bumpy path to modernity, Schultheiss suggests that nursing acts as an important lens through which to observe larger struggles over gendered sacrifice, social citizenship, and political belonging at this critical juncture in French history.

To Be a Worker: Identity and Politics in Peru is about the struggle of the Peruvian working class during the 1970s and 1980s. During the 1970s—under the regime of General Juan Velazco Alvarado and General Francisco Morales Bermúdez—and during the 1980s—under presidents Fernando Belaunde Terry and Alan García—a number of labor rights were granted in Peru. However, during the 1990s—with Alberto Fujimori's democratic and later dictatorial government—labor rights almost disappeared completely and the overall situation of the Peruvian working-class decayed drastically. In this book, Parodi's primary concerns are workers' daily lives and their role in Peruvian politics. Consequently throughout the book he analyzes the origin of their social identity, their relation to income and to the unions. His principal case of study is Metallurgical workers.

“The formation of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) marked a high point in the world working-class movement . . . the last chance for a worldwide social transformation created by the working class,” argues Victor Silverman in Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labor, 1939–1949 (13). While it is difficult to share Silverman's sanguine view of the world federation, which was created with high hopes by Soviet, American (Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO]), and British organized labor in 1945 only later to come solidly under the control of the communist bloc, his study offers a fascinating and sophisticated account of foreign policies perspectives among both elite and rank and file trade unionists and their efforts to shape the post-war world.

In this wide-ranging and often fascinating study of trade unionism in the longshore sector of New York, San Pedro, and New Orleans and the steel industry in Atlanta and Youngstown, Bruce Nelson sets out to pursue three central areas of inquiry. The first is an investigation into the “relative importance of employers and workers in shaping racially segmented hierarchies in the workplace” (xxv). The second is an examination of “the relationship between organized labor and the struggle for black equality and the role of trade unions in diminishing or—in some cases—deepening racial inequality” (xxv). Third, he tackles “the question of working class agency. What did workers want? What forces shaped what they could ‘do and dream'” (xxv)? Nelson delivers on part of this ambitious agenda, spending more time on the second area of inquiry than on the first and third. He carries out the second task most effectively, coming down hard on the unions he studies—the American Federation of Labor's (AFL) International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) and the Congress of Industrial Organization's (CIO) International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) and United Steelworkers of America. Indeed, the book's strongest contribution lies in its careful demonstration of these unions' multiple shortcomings when it came to black equality.

Few fields in American history are as conscious of their historiography as American labor and working-class history. The oft-cited narrative traces the roots of the field to the work of E. P. Thompson and, in particular, to his Making of the English Working Class. Thompson's vision of the working class as the product of common experiences and his boundless belief in the agency of working people helped spur American historians to revisit dusty archives and collect and listen to oral histories in order to give ordinary people a central place in American history. Where the “old labor history” had been located in economics, not history, departments and focused almost exclusively on trade unions as a source of political moderation, the first practitioners of the “new labor history” looked beyond unions for the origins of American radicalism and examples of collective resistance to capitalism. David Montgomery, Herbert Gutman, and David Brody are usually described as the fathers of the “new labor history.” In Hard Work, Melvyn Dubofsky claims his place in that historiographic pantheon.

The question “Is there a new labor studies?” dominated the discussion of a workshop on the subject of teaching the labor movement held at New School University in November 2000. Common observations about the dominance of economic paradigms, corporate influence in the academy, and the rise of area studies were addressed, and emphasis was laid on the flowering of local, identity-inspired histories, a trend that has become somewhat controversial in the larger field of labor studies. Some who are involved in concrete union organizing and nuts-and-bolts industrial relations have seen such an emphasis on place-specific cultural history as suggestive of a defeatist attitude, hallmark of a post-union society and world. In this context it was apropos of John Russo (Center for Working Class Studies, Youngstown State University) to mention the importance of recent work being done by several geographers who have paid much attention to the importance of place-specific labor activities which in shaping local landscapes have had far-reaching effects.

Two explosions in US working-class history are the focus of the volumes under review. The first pre-dated the emergence of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), many of whose tough-minded organizers were in the process of emerging from the Marxist-influenced First International. AFL chief Samuel Gompers referred to the 1877 labor upsurge in this way: “Made desperate by the accumulation of miseries, without organizations strong enough to conduct a successful strike, the railway workers rebelled. Their rebellion was a declaration of protest in the name of American manhood against conditions that nullified the rights of American citizens. The railroad strike of 1877 was the tocsin that sounded a ringing message of hope to us all.”

Mother Jones is legendary. Her courageous and unrelenting militancy, spirited and quotable speeches, and gutsy flaunting of convention have made her a hero for twentieth century labor organizers, feminists, and social justice activists. In this captivating biography, Elliott Gorn illuminates Mother Jones by uncovering her self-created persona whom the author contextualizes in the contours of social and political history. Gorn's arguments are constructed around two main themes: How gender identity determined Jones' work and how historical truth and the creation of myth bolstered her causes.

Howard Kimeldorf's Battling for American Labor explores “the distinctive industrial radicalism of American labor” during the Progressive Era (5). He takes to task the whole tired notion of an ideological battle for American workers waged between the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) that has interested generations of scholars since at least the time Eugene Debs said there was a clear “choice between the A.F. of L. and capitalism on one side, and the Industrial Workers of the World and socialism on the other” (3). Kimeldorf states that too much of the labor history of the early twentieth century has been told as simply an ideological war for the hearts and minds of American workers. This smart book deals with two case studies of groups of workers who, over time, start out in the IWW fold and eventually join the AFL. This story traditionally has been told as the growth of either “job consciousness,” a case of “false consciousness,” or the growing conservatism of American workers. Kimeldorf suggests a fresh way of looking at this important issue. Rather than seeing the workers as having changed, he suggests that, through a careful study of the workers' actions, it was the AFL who in fact was transformed because of the workers.

On September 11, 2001, the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center targeted a city that has long been a symbol of high finance, speculation, and investment—the capital of multinational capitalism. Yet among those killed in New York were hundreds of working-class men and women, people whose labor has long been essential to the functioning of Wall Street. The causalities included electricians, dishwashers, and janitors, as well as “pink collar” workers such as secretaries, typists, and file clerks. Joshua Freeman reminds us that these laborers played an important role in shaping the politics and society of modern New York as did the financiers, brokers, and lawyers so central to our image of the global metropolis. Freeman begins his book with a criticism of the “astonishing blindness” to working-class life in the “vast literature celebrating postwar New York” (xiv). Working-Class New York goes a long way toward the rewriting of the history of New York with workers at the center.

The US government's ideological and foreign policy imperatives during the Cold War years, argues historian and legal scholar Mary Dudziak, had a paradoxical effect on the trajectory of civil rights reform. International pressures would “simultaneously constrain and enhance civil rights reform” (11). On the one hand, the anti-communism of the Cold War era silenced the more radical opponents of American race relations, capitalism, and colonialism, leading to a “narrowing of acceptable civil rights discourse” (13). On the other hand, racist violence and the persistence of Jim Crow made it hard for government officials to portray the United States as a democratic, free, and open society, one that was vastly superior to the totalitarianism of the Soviet bloc. That proved to be a problem, however, as the Soviets and Americans competed for the allegiance of growing numbers of nations undergoing a process of decolonization. Civil rights activists skillfully took advantage of the opening provided by the Cold War, aggressively and sometimes successfully advancing their campaign for civil rights.