¹ Quotes from Zeitlin, Jonathan “‘Rank and Filism’ in British Labour History: A Critique”, International Review of Social History, XXXIV (1989), pp. 42–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “‘Rank and Filism’ and Labour History: A Rejoinder to Price and Cronin”, International Review of Social History, XXXIV (1989), pp. 89–102Google Scholar, and “From Labour History to the History of Industrial Relations”, Economic History Review, 2nd series, XL (1987), pp. 159–184.Google Scholar

² Zeitlin, , “‘Rank and Filism’ and Labour History: A Rejoinder to Price and Cronin”, p. 101.Google Scholar

³ Price, Richard, “‘What's in a Name?’ Workplace History and ‘Rank and Filism’”, International Review of Social History, XXXIV (1989), pp. 62–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cronin, James E., “The ‘Rank and File’ and the Social History of the Working Class”, International Review of Social History, XXXIV (1989), pp. 78–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hyman, Richard, “The Sound of One Hand Clapping: A Comment on the ‘Rank and Filism’ Debate”, International Review of Social History, XXXIV (1989), pp. 309–326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ In suggesting the compatibility of an industrial relations approach to labour history “of New Left or syndicalist persuasion”, David Brody has noted recently that “we have yet to see a proposal for a new synthesis by an American working-class historian along the lines of, say, ‘From Labour History to the History of Industrial Relations’, which happens to be the title of a recent essay by the keen young Anglo-American labor historian Jonathan Zeitlin”. See Brody, , “Labor History, Industrial Relations, and the Crisis of American Labor”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 43 (1989), p. 13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ For overviews of the history of labour history, see: Brody, David, “The Old Labor History and the New: In Search of an American Working Class”, Labor History, 20 (1979), pp. 111–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Labor History, Industrial Relations, and the Crisis of American Labor”, pp. 7–18Google Scholar; Montgomery, David, “To Study the People: The American Working Class”, Labor History, 21 (1980), pp. 485–512CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scranton, Philip, “None-Too-Porous Boundaries: Labor History and the History of Technology”, Technology and Society, 29 (1988), pp. 722–773Google Scholar; Brody, David, “Workers and Work in America: the New Labor History”, in Gardner, James B. and Adams, George Rollie (eds), Ordinary People and Everyday Life: Perspectives on the New Social History (Nashville, 1983), pp. 154–155Google Scholar, and Dubofsky, Melvyn, “Workers, Jews, and the American Past: Review of Gutman's Power and Culture, Essays on the American Working Class”, Tikkun 3 (3) (1988), pp. 95–97.Google Scholar The main exceptions to this were the writings of Philip Foner, a prolific communist historian whose histories of the U.S. labour movement contain frequent evaluations of leaders' correct, and more often incorrect stances. For example, see Foner's multi-volume History of the Labor Movement in the United States.

⁶ For better or worse, the new U.S. labour historians of the first wave are not known for their attentiveness to theoretical debate. Adopting with little hesitation or reflection a Thompsonian definition of class and class consciousness, labour historians in the U.S. have remained largely immune from the serious debates between advocates of structuralism and human agency that have engaged the energies of British, Latin American, and South African scholars. For a discussion of the ways in which these debates have shaped Latin American labour historiography, see Costa, Emilia Viotti da, “Experience Verses Structures: New Tendencies in the History of Labor and the Working Class in Latin America – What Do We Gain? What Do We Lose?”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 36 (1989), pp. 3–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Today, theoretical contests are fought over post-structuralism, with feminist historian Joan Scott insisting that labour historians and others operate on the terrain of discourse analysis. See: Scott, Joan, “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 31 (1987), pp. 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar One of the few serious attempts at critically incorporating explicitly theoretical concepts into empirical research has come not from historians but from a political scientist. See excellent, Ira Katznelson's “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons”, in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986), pp. 3–41.Google Scholar

⁷ For a recent interpretation of the rise of a new, radical history and its encounter with the established historical profession, see Wiener, Jonathan M., “Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1950–1980”, The Journal of American History, 76 (09 1989), pp. 399–434CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the new social history, see Zunz, Olivier, “The Synthesis of Social Change: Reflections on American Social History”, in Zunz, Olivier (ed.), Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill, 1985), pp. 63–114Google Scholar, and Berlin, Ira, “Introduction: Herbert G. Gutman and the American Working Class”, in Berlin, Ira (ed.), Gutman, Herbert G., Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class (New York, 1987), pp. 3–69.Google Scholar

⁸ Brecher, Jeremy, Strike! (San Francisco, 1972), pp. vii–viiiGoogle Scholar, and Alice, and Lynd, Staughton, Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers (Boston, 1973), p. 3.Google Scholar For an excellent account of New Left radical historians, Radical America, and its political vision, see Green, James, “Introduction”, in Green, James (ed.), Workers' Struggles, Past and Present: A “Radical America” Reader (Philadelphia, 1983), pp. 3–32Google Scholar; also see Montgomery, David, “Spontaneity and Organization: Some Comments”, Radical America, 7 (11–12 1973), pp. 70–80.Google Scholar

⁹ Frances Fox Piven and Cloward, Richard A., “The Industrial Workers' Movements”, in Piven, and Cloward, , Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York, 1977), pp. 96–180.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Is it a coincidence that these historians and sociologists, unlike many (though obviously not all) who reject their version of rank and filism, were and remain activist writers and intellectuals? Brecher, an historian who works outside of the academy, has organized and participated in oral history projects, radio programs, and other public history activities. Staughton Lynd currently works as a labour lawyer and community activist in steel towns hard hit by deindustrialization; his participation at professional historical conferences and his writings on labour and the law bring together in a unique way contemporary practice and theory. Piven and Cloward have subsequently written about the Reagan (and pre-Reagan) attacks against the U.S. welfare state and have been prominent in voter registration drives aimed at reorienting the direction of the Democratic Party.

One of Zeitlin's rank-and-filist assumptions that stresses the incorporative, depolitici-zing nature of institutional achievements can be most clearly found in critical labour law, although scholars in this tradition have followed a different pathway to their conclusions and pose a different set of questions and problems. See: Klare, Karl, “Juridical Deradica-lization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1937–1941”, Minnesota Law Review, 62 (1978), pp. 265–339Google Scholar; and “Labor Law as Ideology: Toward a New Historiography of Collective Bargaining Law”, Industrial Relations Law Journal, 4 (1981), pp. 450–506.Google Scholar

¹¹ See the numerous essays in Gutman, Herbert G., Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York, 1977)Google Scholar, and Gutman, , Power and Culture.Google Scholar

¹² Montgomery, David, “Workers' Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century”, in Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 9–31Google Scholar, and The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 9–57.Google Scholar

¹³ The study of workers' control in the United States has not been confined to skilled craftsmen or their unions, or consisted in an unqualified celebration of that power. In some cases, the union presence was decisive. Bruce Nelson has shown that the triumph of the International Longshoremen's Association (soon to become the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union) on the West Coast after the great strike of 1934 produced a veritable revolution in social relations on the docks and decks; my own work on New Orleans dock workers shows that from 1880 to the 1920s, unions and union alliances (across racial and occupational lines) were decisive factors in winning and maintaining control not only for the port's most skilled workers but for its unskilled men as well. Struggles over workplace control have been well documented for late nineteenth-century railroad workers, and early twentieth-century cigar makers, butchers, and metal-trades workers, and mid-twentieth-century department store saleswomen. See: Nelson, Bruce, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana, 1988)Google Scholar; Arnesen, Eric, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (New York, forthcoming)Google Scholar; Bucki, Cecilia F., “Dilution and Craft Tradition: Bridgeport, Connecticut, Munitions Workers, 1915–1919”, Social Science History, 4 (1980), pp. 105–124Google Scholar; Barrett, James R., Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers 1894–1922 (Urbana, 1987)Google Scholar; Cooper, Patricia, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana, 1987)Google Scholar; Benson, Susan Porter, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, 1986)Google Scholar, and Stromquist, Shelton, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana, 1987).Google Scholar

¹⁴ For a representative sample of community studies, see: Dawley, Alan, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, 1976)Google Scholar; Faler, Paul, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Albany, 1981)Google Scholar; Hirsch, Susan E., Roots of the American Working Class: The Industrialization of Crafts in Newark, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia, 1978)Google Scholar; Dublin, Thomas, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Laurie, Bruce, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia, 1980)Google Scholar; Couvares, Frances, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877–1919 (Albany, 1984)Google Scholar; Walkowitz, Daniel J., Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855–1884 (Urbana, 1978)Google Scholar; Rosenzweig, Roy, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Prude, Jonathan, The Coming of Industrial Order-Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; Scranton, Philip, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800–1885 (New York, 1983)Google Scholar, and Kazin, Michael, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana, 1987).Google Scholar On organization, see: Dubofsky, Melvyn, We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW(New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Fink, Leon, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, 1983)Google Scholar, and Levine, Susan, Labor's True Women: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia, 1984).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Stansell, , City of Women; Mary Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (Urbana, 1988)Google Scholar; Baron, Ava, “Questions of Gender: Deskilling and Demasculinization in the U.S. Printing Industry, 1830–1915”, Gender and History, 1 (1989), pp. 178–199CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Rachleff, Peter, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865–1890 (Urbana, 1989)Google Scholar, Arnesen, , Waterfront Workers of New OrleansGoogle Scholar; Worthman, Paul, “Black Workers and Labor Unions in Birmingham, Alabama, 1897–1904”, Labor History, 10 (1969), PP. 375–407CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trotter, Joe William Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat 1915–45 (Urbana, 1985)Google Scholar; Meier, August and Rudwick, Elliot, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Lewis, Ronald L., Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict 1780–1980 (Lexington, 1987)Google Scholar, and Gottlieb, Peter, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916–30 (Urbana, 1987).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Nelson, , Workers on the WaterfrontGoogle Scholar; Freeman, Joshua B., In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966 (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Fink, Leon and Greenberg, Brian, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers' Union, Local 1199 (Urbana, 1989)Google Scholar; Gerstle, Gary, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (New York, 1989)Google Scholar, and Milkman, Ruth, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana, 1987).Google Scholar Two important works that appeared in the early 1980s are Lichtenstein, Nelson, Labor's War at Home: The CIO During World War II (New York, 1982)Google Scholar, and Schatz, Ronald W., The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–60 (Urbana, 1983).Google Scholar Two recent works that address the role of the law are Forbath, William E., “The Shaping of the American Labor Movement”, Harvard Law Review, 102 (1989), pp. 1111–1256CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Tomlins, Christopher L., The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (Cambridge, 1985).Google Scholar

¹⁸ For examples, see Henretta, James et al. , America's History (Chicago, 1987)Google Scholar; Norton, Mary Beth et al. , A People and a Nation: A History of the United States (Boston, 1986)Google Scholar, and Nash, Gary et al. , The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Amerian Social History Project, Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 1, From Conquest and Colonization Through Reconstruction and the Great Uprising of 1877 (New York, 1989), p. xii.Google Scholar

The proliferation of case studies has transformed the field in less than a generation; that same proliferation has left many labor historians frustrated at the lack of “synthesis” – so much is known, but no one has risen to the occasion to pull it all together. While the absence of a U.S. version of E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class troubles more than a few, some contend that such a project – given the size of the United States, its regional and economic diversity, and the heterogeneity of its working classes – may be an impossibility. On the question of synthesis, see: Brody, David, “Workers and Work in America: The New Labor History”, in Ordinary People and Everyday Life, pp. 154–55Google Scholar, and Kazin, Michael, “Limits of the Workplace”, Labor History, 30 (1989), p. 111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see the contributions by Fink, Leon, Reich, Michael, Buhle, Mari Jo, Dawley, Alan, Wilentz, Sean, Brody, David, and Kessler-Harris, Alice, in Moody, J. Caroll and Kessler-Harris, Alice (eds), Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problems of Synthesis (DeKalb, 1989).Google Scholar

²⁰ See: Diggins, John Patrick, “Comrades and Citizens: New Mythologies in American Historiography”, The American Historical Review, 90 (1985), pp. 614–638CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kraditor, Aileen S., The Radical Persuasion 1890–1917: Aspects of the Intellectual History of Three American Radical Organizations (Baton Rouge, 1981)Google Scholar; non-conservative critics who challenge this view of oppositional values include Lears, Jackson, “Power, Culture, and Memory”, The Journal of American History, 75 (1988), pp. 137–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ McDonnell, Lawrence T., “‘You are Too Sentimental’: Problems and Suggestions for a New Labor History”, Journal of Social History (1984), pp. 629–654CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Monds, Jean, “Workers' Control and the Historians: A New Economism”, New Left Review, 97 (1976), pp. 81–104Google Scholar, and Kazin, Michael, “The Historian as Populist”, Review of Gut-man's Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, The New York Review of Books, 12 05 1988.Google Scholar

²² Leuchtenburg, William E., “The Pertinence of Political History; Reflections on the Significance of the State in America”, The Journal of American History, 73 (1986), pp. 585–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hays, Samuel P., “Politics and Social History: Toward a New Synthesis”, in Ordinary People and Everyday Life, pp. 161–179Google Scholar; Tomlins, Christopher, “Review of Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor”, in Labour History, 55 (1988), pp. 97–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Genovese, Eugene and Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, “The Political Crisis of Social History: Class Struggle as Subject and Object”, in Fox-Genovese, and Genovese, , Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York, 1983), pp. 179–212.Google Scholar

²³ For a comprehensive overview, see: Helmbold, Lois Rita and Schofield, Ann, “Women's Labor History, 1790–1945”, Reviews in American History (1989), pp. 501–518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁴ The past several years have witnessed attacks on Herbert Gutman's suggestive essay on black union organizer Richard Davis and the racially egalitarian strands within the United Mine Workers of America in the late nineteenth century. Herbert Hill and David Roediger have charged Gutman and his “followers” with privileging class over race, ignoring racism, and romanticizing the history of the labour movement. See: Hill, Herbert, “Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 2 (1988), pp. 132–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hill, , “Race, Ethnicity and Organized Labor: The Opposition to Affirmative Action”, New Politics, 1 (1987), pp. 32–82Google Scholar; Roediger, Dave, “Notes on Working Class Racism”, New Politics, II (1989), pp. 61–66Google Scholar, and “‘Labor in White Skin’; Race and Working-Class History”, in Reshaping the U.S. Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s (London, 1988), pp. 287–308.Google Scholar For challenges to Hill, see Brier, Stephen, “In Defense of Gutman: The Union's Case”Google Scholar, in “Labor, Race and the Gutman Thesis: Responses to Herbert Hill”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 2 (1989), pp. 382–395.Google Scholar In New Politics, 1 (1987)Google Scholar, see: Salvatore, Nick, “Workers, Racism and History: A Response”, pp. 22–26Google Scholar, and Brody, David, “Hill Discounts Larger Context”, pp. 38–41.Google Scholar

²⁵ Brody, , “The Old Labor History and the New”, p. 125Google Scholar; Montgomery, David, “To Study the People: The American Working Class”, Labor History, 21 (1980), p. 493CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Salvatore, Nick, “Introduction” to “Labor History and Industrial Relations: A Symposium”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 43 (1989), pp. 5–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Brody, , “Labor History, Industrial Relations, and the Crisis of American Labor”, pp. 7–18Google Scholar; Gordon, Andrew, “An International Perspective on Technology and Theory: A Response to Philip Scranton”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 35 (1989), p. 31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Scranton, Philip, “The Workplace, Technology, and Theory in American Labor History”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 35 (1989), pp. 3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Scranton, , “None-Too-Porous Boundaries: Labor History and the History of Technology”, pp. 722–743Google Scholar; Lazonick, William, “The Breaking of the American Working Class”, Reviews in American History, 17 (1989), pp. 277–282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁷ Brinkley, Alan, “The World of Workers”, The New Republic, 8 02 1988, pp. 35–38.Google Scholar The piece is a review of Gutman's Power and Culture and Montgomery's The Fall of the House of Labor.

²⁸ Kazin's dislike of Segmented Work, Divided Workers, authored by three Marxist economists, David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, is apparent when he concludes that the “neglect of the cultural and ideological aspects of workers' lives is a step backward for the synthetic project”. He assumes, of course, that the “synthetic project” is a good idea whose time has come, and that a study – even a schematic one as Segmented Work – that fails to capture the totality of workers' experience and priorities is fatally flawed. These standards are indeed high. On the other side of the divide, Gordon, Edwards and Reich lamented labour historians' failure to “integrate economic analyses of the dynamics of capital accumulation with historical analyses of the complexity, totality, and specificity of working-class experience” – a criticism that rings as true for many studies today as it did in 1982 when Segmented Work was published. Historians and economists may have a great deal to teach each other, but the learning process will require a degree of tolerance for the peculiarities, methodologies, and objects of specialized study of the respective fields that we have yet to witness. See: Kazin, Michael, “Struggling with the Class Struggle”, Labor History, 28 (1987), pp. 507–508CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, David M., Edwards, Richard, and Reich, Michael, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge, 1982), p. xi.Google Scholar

²⁹ While labour historians have not explored working-class conservatism to Kazin's or Zieger's satisfaction, the subject has hardly been ignored. See Keyssar, Alexander, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Hareven, Tamara K. and Langenbach, Randolph, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Hareven, Tamara K., Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship Between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, Leloudis, James, Korstad, Robert, Murphy, Mary, Jones, Lu Ann, and Daly, Christopher B., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Emmons, David M., The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana, 1989)Google Scholar, and Rosenzweig, , Eight Hours for What We Will.Google Scholar

³⁰ Kazin, , “Struggling with the Class Struggle”, pp. 507–510Google Scholar; “Limits of the Workplace”, Labor History, 30 (1989), pp. 110–113Google Scholar; Zieger, Robert, “The Many Mansions of David Montgomery”, Labor History, 30 (1989), p. 124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Kazin, , “A People Not a Class: Rethinking the Political Language of the Modern US Labor Movement”, Reshaping the U.S. Left: Popular Struggle in the 1980s (London, 1988), pp. 257–285.Google Scholar Approaching the matter from somewhat different perspectives, see Bodnar, John, “Immigration, Kinship, and the Rise of Working-Class Realism in Industrial America”, Journal of Social History, 14 (1980), pp. 45–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Salvatore, Nick, “Response to Sean Wilentz, ‘Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790–1920’”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 26 (1984), pp. 25–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ Also see, for example, Wilentz, Sean, “Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 26 (1984), pp. 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and responses by Nick Salvatore and Michael Hanagan in the same issue.

³² Neither do U.S. labour historians endow workers with some “latent reservoir” of revolutionary potential or take working-class solidarity for granted, rooting its presence or absence solely at the point of production, as Zeitlin claims British labour historians do. At the same time, few monographs ignore community, family, and ethnicity; gender relations are slowly getting more attention (though the same cannot be said for race). On the array of divisions on and off the shop floor within the American working class, see: Oestreicher, Richard Jules, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana, 1986)Google Scholar; Ross, Steven J., Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890 (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; Rosenzweig, , Eight Hours for What we WillGoogle Scholar, and Gottlieb, , Making Their Own Way.Google Scholar

³³ While many acknowledge historiographical debts and some even celebrate traditions (in labour history, Thompson, Gutman, and Montgomery are routinely and respectfully cited), most also stress, sometimes unduly, what is novel. In their introductions to dissertations and first books in particular, authors take great pains to advertise their distinctive contributions, often promising revolutionary breakthroughs in conceptualization. After years of painstaking research, who would want to announce that their accomplishment consisted of merely confirming the already-known? In a process analogous to capitalism's continual differentiation of consumer products, there is a tendency within the American academy to innovate for innovation's sake.

³⁴ Cooper, Patricia A., “Recasting Labor History: A Response to Philip Scranton”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 35 (1989), p. 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cronin, James E., “The ‘Rank and File’ and the Social History of the Working Class”, p. 84.Google Scholar

³⁵ Montgomery, David, “Class, Capitalism, and Contentment”, Labor History, 30 (1989), pp. 125–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁶ See Painter, Nell Irvin, “Bias and Synthesis in History”, pp. 109–112Google Scholar, and Rosen-zweig, Roy, “What Is the Matter with History?”, pp. 117–122Google Scholar, in “A Round Table: Synthesis in American History”, The Journal of American History, 74 (1987), pp. 107–130.Google Scholar