This study concerns a racial massacre which took place in East St Louis, Illinois on 2 July 1917. The violence erupted during a period of acute industrial unrest, and after significant black migration to the city from the South. These contexts were a focus for Elliott Rudwick's Race Riot, published in 1964, the classic study on this subject. A new approach to the context of industrial conflict is taken in the present work, one which considers the precise timing of the outbreak, and the significance of rumour in the riot. The context of community change is also reconsidered, and the underlying causes of whites' racial hostility are discussed. Close attention is given to the moment of the massacre, and an approach is taken to the social psychology of the collective behaviour of the rioters in order to offer explanations for how an entire community became involved in these atrocities.

Recently, we have been informed that the article by Matthew Thomas, “Anarcho-Feminism in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, 1880--1914”, in International Review of Social History, 47 (2002), pp. 1--31, contains a number of pieces of text, in particular in the section “Motherhood, Childcare and Housework” (pp. 15--17), copied from an article by Judy Greenway, “Sex, Politics and Housework”, in: Christine Coates et al. (eds), The Diggers and Dreamers 94/95: Guide to Communal Living (1993), pp. 39-45, without the author having given any proper acknowledgement or reference to this article. Although our Instructions for Contributors clearly state that an author is fully responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material in which they do not hold the copyright and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included, we deeply regret this incident, for which we would like to apologize to Judy Greenway. In the light of this information, the editors have decided, in agreement with Matthew Thomas, to withdraw the electronic version of the article from CJO. The original pagination of the issue, however, is preserved.

This paper aims to explain the different political trajectories and identities of two sets of industrial workers in the city of Lyon, France during the years immediately preceding the first World War. Silk workers supported reformist socialist parties while metalworkers were pillars of the revolutionary syndicalist current that dominated the prewar CGT. Unlike base and superstructure models or political autonomy explanations, it is argued that the particular industrial structures and social relations within each industry interacted with local and national political opportunity structures in ways that rendered some strategies and forms of collective action more efficacious than others. The programs and strategies proposed by revolutionary syndicalism matched the conditions of metalworkers and attracted their support, while reformist socialism struck a similar chord with silk workers resulting in similar results.

I and my son are bakers and barbers, you and your sons are lapidaries and gardeners, but if you bid one of your sons be barber, a second baker, a third lapidary and a fourth gardener, all is confusion, and how can good come out of it? Furthermore he is no barber nor baker who does not belong to the Guild of the Barbers and the Guild of the Bakers. If your son [does not go] to the peshkadim and rank himself among the apprentices; next to the tehaoosh, to bid him inscribe his name on the rolls; then to the kihaya, to pay him toll, how should he be a member of the guild? Ask of the scheikh if I have not spoken well.

This article seeks to interpret the synthesis between anarchism and feminism as developed by a group of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British women. It will demonstrate that the woman who embraced anarchism made a clear contribution to the growth of feminism. They offered a distinctive analysis of the reasons for female oppression, whether it was within the economic sphere or within marriage. The anarcho-feminists maintained that if an egalitarian society was ever to be built, differences in roles – whether in sexual relationships, childcare, political life or work – had to be based on capacity and preference, not gender. By combining these questions they developed a feminism that was all embracing at a time when the struggle for the vote was becoming the main question for women.

Studies of the history of leisure have emphasized the separation between work and leisure which developed with the growth of industrial society. Only scant attention has been devoted by historians and sociologists of leisure to the continuing links between work and leisure throughout the nineteenth century, as reflected in recreational activities organized by employers for their employees. Such attention as has been paid to the subject has concentrated on industrial workers, largely ignoring the more systematic and extensive provision of leisure in work organizations belonging to the public sector. In an attempt to explore linkages between work and leisure in this emerging sector, the article focuses on the English police force and will address the following questions. What did the authorities aim to achieve in imposing control through leisure? How did the policemen react to such policies and was this strategy successful? What prompted the social and economic elite to become involved in moulding entertainment for police employees, and what was the impact of police leisure on the community at large?

As Christopher Johnson rightly argues in the introduction to this collection of essays, de-industrialization is not a recent phenomenon. It has attracted much interest among historians, but that interest has focused primarily on its economic causes and consequences. The social, cultural, and political aspects of de-industrialization have attracted less attention – perhaps because our discipline is more concerned with the formation of social relationships and social movements and less with their disappearance. Do the close ties between social historians and social movements play a role here? Does their involvement blind them to the process of decline? Significantly, the most famous and impressive analysis of an anti-de-industrialization movement sheds little light on that aspect; it was the radical resistance to the parallel process of industrialization that captured the author's imagination.

The question of assimilation networks for migrants is usually applied to international migration. In this study, however, I use the population registers for a neighborhood in early modern Kyoto to look for possible network connections in domestic migration. I found a yearly turnover of fourteen households moving in and out of the neighborhood. Household and group migration was more important than individual migration and there is some sign of primary–secondary migration flows. Service migration did not play a major role in the migration patterns of this neighborhood, but the textile industry was probably an important attraction. Evidence of networks appears in the use of shop names that reflect a connection with a province or some specific location. These shop names usually reflected the place of origin of the household and may have been an effective method of gaining network connections and the guarantors necessary for finding housing and employment.

The problem of de-industrialization has undergone a decisive transmutation in the past two decades, roughly from the moment when it was linked to proto-industrialization at the Budapest Economic History Conference in 1981. Also interacting with the remarkable efforts of Immanuel Wallerstein and his colleagues who dated the formation of a “world economic system” from the expansion of European conquest and trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its place in historical and sociological analysis rapidly transcended local concerns (such as the warmly received 1982 study by Bluestone and Harrison of the American “rust belt”) and has become an element in the overall problematique of global capitalism. Only very recently, however, have the necessary studies (and hence theoretical perspectives) formed an appropriate critical mass to integrate the concept of de-industrialization fully into the long-term history of economic globalism. We are coming to understand that the phenomenon at the tip of the tongue of every head of state and the source of massive (and lethal) protest that came to be termed “globalization” in ordinary parlance around 1990 is hardly new and, most importantly, not simply a one-way street originating in the West.

In the past three decades a fair number of historical demographers and family and labour historians have used the concept of “family strategies” as a means to understand better the social behaviour of individuals and families. At the 26th Annual Meeting of the American Social Science History Association (Chicago, November 2001), a session of the Family/Demography Network was devoted to a critical discussion of this concept of family strategies. Given the importance of the issue, we have invited three of the panelists to rework the papers they gave on that occasion. Two of them, Katherine Lynch and Pier Paolo Viazzo, have joined forces here to discuss the matter from a predominantly theoretical perspective with particular attention to the use of the concept in social anthropology, and in medieval and early modern history. Based on recent Dutch empirical studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Theo Engelen questions the use of the concept of family strategies, given the availability of the broader concept of agency. The riposte to these critiques comes from Jan Kok, who is actively engaged in the application of the concept of family strategies in the research programme of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

Clara Zetkin (1857–1933) remains one of the most famous figures in the history of the German and international Left. She rose to prominence as a social democrat beginning in 1890 and became a Marxist and, as of 1919, a member of the high-ranking cadre of the KPD; she was an activist of the Second International, starting in 1889, and belonged to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (EKKI) in the 1920s. She is known in history primarily as the leader and chief ideologue of the socialist, and later the international communist, women's movement, but is also a popular figure in the leftist women's movement of the twentieth century. Zetkin, the founder of International Women's Day, is still widely depicted as a heroine. However, in light of recent research conducted in Berlin and Moscow and from the perspective of the history of mentalities, the tendency to mythologize her needs to be questioned. This essay on Clara Zetkin's constructs of femininity is part of a biography oriented toward a history of mentalities, in which the socialist and communist Zetkin is presented in the entire societal context of her times, perceived as a contemporary of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From this perspective, it is precisely Zetkin's comments on the women's issue that mirror the influences of Social Darwinism and biological discussion at the turn of the century in Germany. The ideas held by the leader and theoretician of the international socialist women's movement on the “liberation of women” from “gender slavery” and “class bondage” were not aimed at pursuing an autonomous process of emancipating women for their own sake, but at pursuing a well-structured and directed process of educating them that would end up turning them into a new physically and mentally improved “consummate woman” who would efficiently serve the socialist society.

In 1999 the South African government passed the Municipal Structures Act which established the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Council and merged the East Rand towns of Alberton, Germiston, Brakpan, Benoni, Kempton Park, Springs, and Nigel under a common municipal authority. The new demarcation created a unified administrative structure for this region of approximately 2.5 million people living east of Johannesburg. It gave formal expression to long-standing processes of socioeconomic development that have defined the East Rand as a highly specific geographical entity. Between the 1950s and the 1970s the East Rand mapped itself on to South Africa's economic terrain as its industrial “workshop”, as manufacturing replaced mining as the major contributor to GDP. The administrative unification of the East Rand has taken place, however, at a moment when established patterns of economic and social integration based on manufacturing are undermined by the impact of restructuring encouraged by domestic and global forces.

In 1900, Western Australia, a self-governing British colony, adopted compulsory conciliation and arbitration legislation, the first Australian colony to do so. This article focuses primarily on the roles the colonial state and capital played in the adoption of the legislation and proposes a broader, more complex explanation for the introduction of the legislation than current mainstream Western Australian historiography, which, mostly, constructed the event as an unproblematic regional labour triumph. This article argues that the legislation was passed to prevent disruption to gold mining, the industry driving the development of the colony, and to revive the flagging political fortunes of the colonial government. It asserts that the timing of the legislation pre-empted a more effective bill being introduced under conditions less favourable to capital. Organized labour, which, through its lobbying, had created consensus about the desirability of introducing the legislation, was unable to influence the shape of the legislation significantly.

With the burning of central Thailand's capital city, Ayudhya, in 1767 and the destruction of virtually all the records kept there by the centralized bureaucracy of that kingdom, and with the Burmese occupation of the north and the devastating years of fighting around 1800 to drive them out, there is virtually no written record left at all for Thailand prior to the nineteenth century. There is a little material on rulers and some of their activities, but for social history the record is nearly blank. Is there then no way to write a social history or a gender history for Thailand?

In this essay, we consider family history as a common field of substantive and theoretical interest shaped by contacts among several disciplines. These disciplines obviously include social history and population studies, but also – and rather prominently – social anthropology. One major component of the growth of family history has been the increasing amount of attention that historians pay to topics such as marriage, kinship, and the family, which have long been of central significance in the anthropological investigation of social structure. On the other hand, anthropologists have become aware of the serious limitations of synchronic, present-oriented field research, and most of them now probably agree that historical analysis is essential if they are to understand social and cultural processes. This realization has gradually changed many anthropologists from reluctant consumers of historical work into active and often quite enthusiastic producers.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. [By] Anthony Carew, Michel Dreyfus, Geert Van Goethem [and] Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick. Marcel van der Linden (Ed.) [International and Comparative Social History, vol. 3.] Peter Lang, Bern [etc.] 2000. 624 pp. S.fr. 117.00; DM 147.00; S 975.00.

Phyllis Moen and Elaine Wethington were absolutely right when they called family strategies “the intuitively appealing metaphor for family response to structural barriers”. This appeal probably explains the avalanche of studies on the subject since the 1970s and especially since the 1980s. The last contribution, to my knowledge, is a collection of articles edited by Laurence Fontaine and Jurgen Schlumbohm in 2000. I will not even try to outline the vast historiography. This paper focuses on another problem. It is an attempt to show that concepts built on appealing metaphors lose much of their appeal in empirical research for the simple reason that their application tends to be more complicated than expected. In the following pages an example of such an experience is presented. Within the virtual walls of the Dutch National Research Institute for Economic and Social History, the N.W. Posthumus Institute, we have been struggling with family strategies since 1994. Now that we are about to publish the third volume on the subject, it is time to evaluate what we have accomplished.

A romanticized view of class alignment in Britain exists that has been attacked and defended equally in academic works over the last twenty years. Historically, the Labour Party was seen as the defender of working-class interests, though critics within the party and the British socialist movement have often questioned this notion. Such questions have appeared more pertinent with the diminution of the working class due to the de-industrialization of the British economy. In 1983 Andrew Gamble noted that: “The greatest threat to this underlying strength of the British labour movement are the twin trends of declining manufacturing output and rising unemployment”. He argued that it was the failure of the Labour Party to arrest these trends and “translate the overwhelming objective strength [...] into organizational strength and political leadership” which had led to the dealignment of the working class away from Labour.