The wave of strikes that swept across the South Carolina rice fields in late 1876 offer rich material for revisiting the most compelling issues in the postwar Reconstruction of the US's former slave states. They expose sharp tensions between the Republican Party's black, working-class constituency and its mostly white, bourgeois leadership. Recent studies, based almost entirely on Northern published opinion, have made the case that Northern Republican elites were driven to “abandon the mid-century vision of an egalitarian free labor society” by assertive ex-slaves oblivious to the “mutual interests” that ostensibly bound them and their employers. This article, based on extensive archival research, asserts that similar fissures opened up between freedpeople and southern Republican officials. In a series of highly effective mobilizations against local planters and determined attempts to block party officials from betraying their interests, rice fieldhands demonstrated a clear understanding of the critical issues at stake during the months leading up to the collapse of Reconstruction. Their intervention contrasted not only with the feeble holding operation pursued by moderates in the upper levels of the Republican party, but also with the timidity of many locally rooted black officials nearer to the grassroots.

For close on half a century, the British naval dockyard in Singapore was a prominent employer in the colony. The huge facility attracted migrant workers from the region, and entire settlements and communities were established around the premises of the dockyard as well. This article seeks to place the legacy of Singapore's naval-base workers within the historical contexts of the entanglements between imperialism, diaspora, social movements, and labour resistance. The development of international labour flows, formation, and identity was reflected in the prominence of the migrant Malayalee community and its socio-religious organizations at the naval base. Furthermore, the routine individual defiance and industrial unrest went beyond disputes about wage levels and working conditions. They were enmeshed within the broader undercurrents of Singapore's transitory political culture, and between the interwar decades and the period of decolonization disturbances at the naval dockyard became part of larger political contestations.

This essay draws upon a larger study of over forty strikes which involved both male and female strikers in the United States between the years 1887 and 1903. Here the focus of analysis is on those strikes which began with demands raised by women workers. The essay examines the nature of women workers' demands, the ways in which cooperation with male co-workers altered those demands, and the affect that formal union involvement had on women strikers and their strike demands. Because the original set of case studies examines strikes across the United States, the strikes explored here also highlight a variety of geographic locations. The insights gained suggest future paths for research on the distinction between women's and men's strike demands.

This essay is animated by a single, seemingly simple, question: “What has happened to Soviet labor and working-class history?” The obvious answer is that it went the way of the Soviet working class. But to attribute changing scholarly interests or emphases to recent or contemporary Russian politics is too simplistic. It ignores too many other factors that impinge on why and how we study what we do. While the near disappearance of class from post-Soviet discourse certainly has had an impact on Western historians, I would suggest that both broader and narrower trends have been at work shaping our scholarly agendas. In 1990, just as the Soviet Union was in its last throes, Leo van Rossum published in this very journal an outstanding omni-review of “Western Studies of Soviet Labour during the Thirties”. A few years further on, “in the cold light of the post-Soviet dawn”, Ron Suny and I searched Soviet history for its working class. It is time once again to revisit this terrain.