A persistent rumor has it that the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis/International Institute for Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, does not intend to continue publishing its series of documentation of central elements of its archives. Editions of this kind are extremely work-intensive and time-consuming, and the institution can no longer afford to finance it. This is what is at the core of the rumor: the IISG has to find money from outside funds in order to finance these editions, but entertains no plans to discontinue the publication of these central sources. If this rumor were true, however, it would be highly deplorable, something which the present volume amply substantiates.

Claire Culleton's study of working-class women in First World War Britain is an ambitious project that aims at a “comprehensive analysis of the complexities that conspired to link women's lives, their work, and their writings” (8). The book is positioned as a study that redresses what Culleton views as the marginalization of working-class women's experience in historical and literary studies of the period. She attempts, therefore, to write a history “from below” that provides both historical analysis of the experience of working-class women who labored in Britain's wartime industries, and an analysis of their culture, as revealed through the 1970s oral history testimonies of the Imperial War Museum and the literature they produced for factory newspapers. She states that she will tie this experience and its “costs” to changes in British society that “no longer permit[ed] sentimentality of hearth and home ( . . . )” (2). Culleton notes that the book is aimed at specialists on the subject and general readers. The analysis presented in the book, however, falls short of the author's stated goals and adds little to the existing scholarship on working-class women in First World War Britain.

In For Home, Country, and Race, Stephen Heathorn sets out to explain the “how” of English nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Rejecting the imperial propagandist theme, Heathorn argues that nationalist agendas in English schools were the product of educators. Accordingly, Heathorn's research focuses on the classroom as the site of nationalist education. Heathorn argues that through educational activities, especially school readers, middle-class educators brought the English working class into their nationalist hegemony. As the book's title suggests, this hegemonic view also promoted class and gender subordination. As Heathorn concludes, the proof of the working class's acceptance of this nationalist hegemony is found in their willingness “to sacrifice their lives and loved ones” in the “cataclysmic clash of rival nationalisms that erupted in 1914” (218).

The postcommunist transformation of the former countries of “real socialism” has become an intriguing topic for economists and political scientists. The Soviet bloc did not just collapse; it collapsed unexpectedly. There are various consequences for the world as a result of this event, which in many ways resemble a gun that is cocked and loaded, but which has not yet fired.

This is a powerful book that documents and examines the horrible exploitation of labor in contemporary China, particularly the vulnerable migrant workers from rural areas. The bulk of the book is the compilation of more than twenty investigative stories that Chan selects from the Chinese language newspapers and journals published in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. All the investigative stories were written by Chinese reporters—some took great risks to do it—and translated into English by Chan and her collaborators. For each case Chan provides a short introduction and “comment” to help the reader comprehend the materials in context and to clarify certain references. In several cases Chan also gives follow-ups to the stories.

During the early 1990s, Argentina's Peronist Party accomplished a political magic trick: under the leadership of President Carlos Menem, Peronism turned away from its traditional commitment to social justice and an activist state, embraced the free market and neoliberal reform, and yet maintained the electoral support of the majority of the poor. For many Argentine intellectuals, this trick was easy enough to explain. According to the conventional wisdom, poor people remained loyal to Peronism, despite their rapidly declining standard of living, either because they remained under the hypnotic spell of Juan and Evita or because they were bought off by clientelist politicians offering handouts. Javier Auyero's ethnography of Peronist politics in an impoverished shantytown on the outskirts of Buenos Aires challenges these simplistic explanations. This timely and important book reconceptualizes political clientelism, a crucial phenomenon within scholarship on Latin America and beyond, while making visible and intelligible a population that has been relegated to marginality both by socioeconomic realities and by academic discourse.

Racial Revolutions comes at a crucial time for indigenist policy in Brazil. Newly elected president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva takes over with several orders for the permanent protection of Indian reserves on his desk, completed but left unsigned by outgoing president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Lula's party, the Workers Party, has a strongly progressive social platform on issues of racial discrimination but no track record or firm positions on Indian issues. Fundamental changes in Brazilian Indian law have been proposed and may come before Congress early this year. Three fatal attacks on Indians occurred in January 2003, the first month of Lula's presidency. One of these cases, the murder by youths of a seventy-seven year-old Indian man in Porto Alegre, recalls the fatal 1997 immolation of a visiting Pataxó leader while sleeping at a bus stop in Brasília, a well-publicized case with which Jonathan Warren opens his book. Finally, anthropologists who work with Indians in Brazil are still dealing with the repercussions of serious ethical charges involving research among the Yanomami Indians raised against senior Amazonianists by journalist Patrick Tierney in his book Darkness in El Dorado (2000).

The Tribute of Blood has already earned an audience among historians of nineteenth and twentieth-century Brazil, who have found in Peter M. Beattie's analysis of military recruitment and enlisted service an innovative and often compelling exploration of a neglected facet of Brazilian history. But the book deserves a wider audience, not least because of Beattie's stated ambition of providing the first book-length study, “that explicitly focuses on impressment and conscription as transatlantic tribute labor systems intricately linked to other labor practices and relations in broader society” (14). Prospective members of such an audience not only stand to learn a great deal about Brazil (indeed, the novice might read The Tribute of Blood as an introduction to the socio-cultural history of Brazil during a “long nineteenth century” of its own). They also might be forced to rethink some of their own assumptions regarding military service in particular and institutional modernization more generally, and draw inspiration from Beattie's impressive command of a wide range of Brazilian sources and his willingness to extend comparisons to and borrow approaches from fields situated at some remove—geographic and otherwise—from his own.

This work provides a treasury of information relating to a short pamphlet, twenty-four pages in length and published in London and Glasgow in June 1837. It remains the only existing slave narrative which uses Creole or dialect as the main form of expression. The pamphlet, entitled A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, played a pivotal role in the abolition of the apprenticeship system. The book, edited by Diana Paton, a history lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Britain, illuminates the argument that historical forces which shaped Jamaica's past were unique, yet similar to those existing in other Caribbean colonies.

Ecuadorianists have long awaited a book on the country's banana industry, and Steve Striffler has made an excellent beginning with this prize-winning research on the United Fruit (UF) company's Tenguel estate. He wanted his study of the workers' struggle for better wages and land to go beyond previous works that tended to focus on leading capitalistic actors. Casting his work in Marxian terms, Striffler finds that worker power—at Tenguel, at other banana producing regions in Ecuador, and across Latin America—played a decisive role in undermining foreign-owned enclaves. Striffler argues that “class struggle” best explains the emergence of the “contract farming” system that transformed agrarian landscapes. Although Ecuadorian worker efforts did not ultimately improve their lives, Striffler finds that struggles at least provided a base for subsequent popular organizations.

Based on the meticulous examination of company and union records and enlightening interviews with workers, Contracting Masculinity is a successful attempt to show how “doing gender” at the provincial utility British Columbia Electric (BE) created systematic sexual inequality from the 1940s to the present. Tellingly, the first union organization at BE was formed in 1944 and the first personnel management department followed in 1945. Creese's aim is to show how the leadership of one white-collar union collaborated with company executives and personnel managers to institutionalize job evaluation (or classification) systems and collective bargaining agreements that normalized “the rights of male breadwinners to higher pay and career mobility” (107). In the process, the (white) male worker became the norm and the object of most union strategies.

In this book, Paul Foos seeks to rescue the Mexican-American War from its status as a forgotten war, a status it has long shared with the Korean War. His approach is in keeping with recent work on the history of war from the perspective of the ordinary soldier, the regulars and militiamen who did the fighting at the front, not from the perspective of the generals. He thus mines a rich and fruitful seam of first person accounts written by soldiers themselves in the form of letters and memoirs long overlooked by historians. He seeks to correct two standard interpretations of the war. One of these, in the triumphalist tradition, interprets the conflict as a limited war that reflected and unleashed American “nationalism;” the other sees it as a victory for moralistic political elites who rescued the nation from the reckless expansionism of Southern extremists by limiting the acquisition of Mexican land in the final settlement. Both interpretations—and the second in particular—spotlight the leading men, insisting it was a war that the “masses” did not “understand, nor did they care” (9). Readers of this lively and eye-opening book are unlikely to put much credence in the received wisdom.

Whether in 1870 or in 2003, reformers concerned with the global logic of capitalism have dreamed of effective international labor standards, imposed through a world body that would stop the downward spiral of wages and working conditions. Here Edward Lorenz offers us a history of US political debates over the International Labor Organization (ILO), founded precisely to stop that spiral. His study provides a comprehensive overview of the different big-level national interests who sought, alternately, to support, contain, or repress the ILO. It's full of enticing research leads and fascinating tidbits about US debates over the ILO. International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) readers, though, will still be left frustrated in their efforts to understand US involvement in the ILO and, especially, organized labor's relationship to it.

Richly descriptive and well documented, Steel and Steelworkers: Race and Class Struggle in Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh by John Hinshaw makes a significant contribution to the growing body of historical research on steel unionism in the twentieth century. Over the past few years, a number of new studies have broadened our understanding of unionization and work practices in the nation's steel mills, by examining in greater detail the patterns of organization in specific mills and mill towns.

Critics, fans and journalists alike, of the players' role in the prolonged major league baseball work stoppage of 1994–1995, generally ignore two key realities of the history of the national pastime. First, at least since the founding of the National League in 1876, baseball at the highest levels has been primarily a business. Neither owners nor players played mainly for “the love of the game.” For the latter it was a way to make a living; for the former it was a way to make a profit.

There are advantages to focusing a single analytical lens on a complex and multidimensional historical event. Lines of causation can be drawn clearly. Intention, action, and consequence can be isolated and explored in depth. This is what Daniel Kryder has done for federal policy toward African Americans during World War II. A political scientist, Kryder looks at African Americans in war production industries, the army, and southern agriculture in the context of two overriding imperatives of officials of the federal state: maintaining wartime production and gaining reelection. He moves to the heart of what states do in wartime. They mobilize industry and people. They suppress dissent. They contain social unrest. Given these demands it is not surprising, Kryder argues, that reform of federal racial policy between 1941 and 1945 was so limited in scope, despite widespread black protest, calls for more progressive measures, and the popular “Double V” campaign. But there are also pitfalls to the single analytical lens, and Kryder encounters these in his conclusion. From one point of view, “the war contained rather than facilitated movements for black liberation” (243), as Kryder argues, but from another vantage the war told an entirely different story.