In the 1905 case Lochner v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a maximum-hours rule was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. At first glance a rule limiting work hours for New York City bakers might appear to have little to do with the African American former slaves that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to protect. However, in Only One Place of Redress David Bernstein argues that Lochner was very relevant to the former slaves and that the courts' subsequent rejection of its doctrine caused African Americans significant economic harm.

In the last half-century, historians have reached a consensus about much of the history of British America during the eighteenth century. One feature of that consensus, argued by Jack Greene, John Philip Reid, and Stanley Engerman among others, is that the economic, legal, political, and social history of the colonies can only be understood in the context of their membership in an Atlantic community. Even the event that destroyed that community—the American Revolution—is now seen as a controversy over an Atlantic constitution. In this book, Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy fills a major lacuna in this approach, by asking why the Caribbean colonists did not join the revolution.

This volume is a throwback to an older style of labor history, one based on the leaders of the labor movement. Craig Phelan has produced an intriguing, and in places even inspiring, history of Terence Powderly, the leader of the Knights of Labor from 1879 to 1893. Powderly's story deserves to be retold. His history stands at the cross-roads of an older American set of ideals dating back to the founding of the nation and the emerging corporate values associated with the late-nineteenth-century rise of big business. This is a story of one of the earliest attempts to break from an elitist model of craft unions and replace it with a broad-based labor movement, one that welcomed skilled and unskilled, men and women, and people of all races. This is the story of how this movement was ultimately crushed by larger forces at work in society. It reminds us of what might have been, and perhaps encourages us to think of what still might be.

Why and how did the institutional characteristics often described as the Japanese system of the Japanese enterprise system emerge? Although there is a broad consensus among researchers that Japan's enterprise system emerged between 1930 and 1955, researchers differ with regard to the importance of the prewar system, changes and their magnitude during the wartime planned economy, and the impact of postwar reforms. Okazaki suggested that the origin of the current Japanese economic system can be found in the wartime planned economy. In contrast, this paper suggests that the impact of postwar reform was crucial for establishing the current system. Specifically, that GHQ's “Americanization” of the economic system created a discontinuous transformation of that system. This paper highlights the effects of occupation reform on changes in corporate finance, governance, and industrial organization. In order to clarify the transformation process of the economic system, I use microdata for capital composition, ownership structure, and firm behavior such as depreciation and investment, which I collected from the 126 largest industrial and mining firms.

“Not only were the histories of the ‘Negro in America’ and railroading inseparable,” says Eric Arnesen in his superb study of African Americans and the railroad industry, but “so too was the history of railroading predicated upon racial divisions of labor” (p. 5). These two fine studies describe both the central role of African Americans in America's railroads and the place of racial discrimination in rail employment. More, they show how railroad labor struggles were the proving ground for the larger struggles for civil rights and racial equality.

The dissertation uses evidence from the notarial records between 1850 and 1905 to analyze the economic and social relations in a transitional economy. During the period covered by the project, the Sates of Yucatan changed from an economic backland to an export-oriented producer of benequen (sisal) used for binding twine and ropes in the United States and Europe. With the postcolonial power struggles in government as a backdrop, I use the notarial records to study the development of the credit market, as well as the social, institutional, and economic relations between the local players in an increasingly integrated export-oriented economy.

The interaction between early English colonists and the native peoples of the New World has received major scholarly attention in the last five years. (See, in addition to Subject Matter: K. O. Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000; and M. Daunton and R. Halpern, eds., Empire and Others: British Encounters With Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.) These studies were spurred, in fair part, by colloquia sponsored by the William and Mary Quarterly and University College, London, in 1996 and 1997. The colloquia addressed questions of the cultural construction of race and racism as contacts with new regions and their peoples developed. Both Joyce Chaplin and Karen Kupperman contributed to the William and Mary Quarterly's colloquium.

The history of the modern corporation is the history of institutional change and of the corporation's attempt to influence and respond to that change. In this book, Harland Prechel supplies a multilayered analysis of the development of big business from the 1880s to the 1990s. Prechel's approach is to draw linkages between the micro (individual managers), meso (corporate), and macro (institutional) levels of behavior and change. This multilayered analysis allows Prechel to expose the connections and also the inherent “irrationalities” between each layer of decision making.

Quantitative economic history has enjoyed substantial successes in the field of early American history. A distinguishing characteristic of scholars of the early American economy has been their ability to reach a broad readership. Their work speaks to both mainstream and economic historians, which is no small achievement.

Buy this book, read it, and keep it on your shelf as a reference. Dora Costa has written an award-winning book about retirement over the past century. She examines long-term trends in the propensity to retire and the impact of health, public pensions, income, and other determinants on the retirement decision.

Episodes of labor-saving technological change and rural–urban migration have become universal patterns of economic development the world over. Donald Holley, in The Second Great Emancipation, sets out to tell the story of the last great episode of such change in the United States, when the cotton harvest was mechanized following World War II. The last major crop to make the transition from hand production, cotton was extraordinarily labor-intensive, especially the harvest. In 1945 millions of workers hand picked almost every boll of American cotton, but by 1970 farmers gathered their crop with John Deere and International Harvester mechanical cotton pickers. Folks, mainly blacks, who had for generations performed one of the most backbreaking forms of stoop labor, moved to northern and western cities. As Holley tells it, the First Great Emancipation occurred when President Lincoln freed the slaves and the Second Great Emancipation when the mechanical cotton harvester freed laborers from the drudgery of the cotton harvest, poverty, and Jim Crow discrimination, and southern producers from inefficient production methods and farm sizes. It is a really big and important story of profound technological and demographic changes with spillover effects into civil rights, racial economic equality, and politics. These events, for example, transformed race from a southern regional to a national issue.

The editors and the Association wish to thank the following individuals who were program committee members, chairs, or discussants at the 2000 Economic History Association Meetings:

Based on a selective reading of over 2,500 secondary sources, From British Peasants is an encyclopedic description of early U.S. social history that attempts to describe the transformation of feudal rural folk from deferential “peasants” into economically and politically independent “farmers” (p. 1). Allan Kulikoff analyzes the alleged transformation through the lens of materialist Marxism (pp. 293–98, where he cites Marx as an authority five times). References to problematic terms such as “class relations” abound (pp. 2, 41, 289–92), and Kulikoff argues, among other things, that “gentlemen” attempted to oppress farmers by refusing “to grant them freehold land,” by forcing “them into permanent tenancy,” by “passing high taxes,” and even by failing “to protect them from bandits or Indians.” Kulikoff further claims that “gentlemen and capitalists dominated legislatures,” engaged in an “orgy of development,” and “violently suppressed” rural rebellions (pp. 288–91). Yet somehow the mighty yeomen “stopped deferring to gentlemen and insisted on democratic decision making” (p. 291).

In this well-written book, Michael J. Webber makes a substantial contribution to the literature on the political economy of the New Deal. The book's topic, campaign finance in the 1936 presidential election, should generate broad interest among social scientists who seek to understand the New Deal. Because the 1936 election demonstrated such remarkable support for the New Dealers, a careful study of who gave financial support to whom in that election can provide insight into the nature of the New Deal coalition and the major policy changes that it brought.

Georg Fertig's Lokales Leben, atlantische Welt is an in-depth account of eighteenth-century migration from Southwest Germany to North America. Above all, the author seeks to explain the nature of migration decisions. Section 1 discusses theories of migration that have been entertained by historians and economists. Section 2 offers a comprehensive characterization of eighteenth-century migration from Germany to North America. Section 3, the monograph's centerpiece, concerns local migration behavior in the village of Göbrichen, located in Baden. Migration decisions in the eighteenth century were made for the most part at the individual and family level; it is at this “micro” level that Fertig explores the many aspects of migration behavior. Much of this section is devoted to explaining, in the manner of David Sabean, the social and economic relationships in this village and how they changed over time. With a motto that the best stuff lies in the details, Fertig provides a plethora of possible demographic, economic, and social reasons why Göbrichen residents might want to leave town.

Dr. Jon Lauck's book focuses on the problem of monopoly in grain-belt states from 1953 to 1980; in doing so, he analyzes a long-standing conflict that has touched the entire agricultural sector during the entire twentieth century. The late-nineteenth-century shift from small-scale farms, spread across the nation, to regional specialization in production, often on large farms, created a struggle in the agricultural and political community that has remained alive until today. Economic, political, and philosophical factors have been integral parts of the controversy. The media has been involved, as evidenced through discussions of unfair practices inflicted on chicken farmers by processors and discussion of rural outmigration. Environmentalists have added to the debate, suggesting that large farms deplete the environment by overusing resources. Politically, as the author states, many have felt that the USDA has supported agribusiness firms rather than the small-scale farmer. The political economy of these issues raises two questions. One, are the increases in farm and processor size efforts to gain market power, making it possible for these firms to engage in anticompetitive behavior? Two, farmers are often loath to leave the family farm behind, and are often thought of as the essence of U.S. history, raising questions as to whether policies should be implemented to maintain the family farm. Dr. Lauck's thorough documentation of the political economy of grain-belt farming from the late 1800s until the late 1980s indicates that answers to these questions are not easily found.

The first Spanish expedition into New Mexico took place in 1598 under Juan de Oñate. Less than a century later, Spanish settlers were expelled from Santa Fe during the Pueblo revolt of 1680 and the Crown was unable to reestablish control until 1692. New Mexico thereafter remained little more than an insecure settlement on the northern edge of Spain's American empire. Like that of the other frontier marches, New Mexico's status changed dramatically after 1750, when Spain, impelled by growing foreign pressure, sought to strengthen the defensive margins of its possessions. New Mexico, Cuba, and the Argentine colony, for example, all received renewed attention in Madrid. Their subsequent development was dramatically altered by the metropolitan response to the Seven Years War (1756–1763), measures known collectively as the Bourbon reforms.

The no-longer-so-New Labor History has reached that venerable age where its founders write reflective autobiographical essays to introduce collections of their publications. And well might Melvyn Dubofsky prepare such an essay and collection. Present at the creation of the New Labor History, Dubofsky has shaped the development of labor history as a teacher and researcher since the 1960s. He has written works essential to any study of American labor history, including the history of the International Workers of the World, We Shall be All (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), biographies of labor leaders John L. Lewis (John L. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977, written with Warren W, Van Tine) and William D. Haywood (“Big Bill” Haywood, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), and a study of labor in American political economy, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

In this new addition to the Greenwood Guides to Historic Events of the Twentieth Century, Robert Himmelberg does a masterful job of creating the kind of teaching and reference tool that the series aims to provide. Following the prescribed format, he moves from a chronology and narrative overview of, topical essays on, and evaluative conclusions about the Great Depression and New Deal to sections containing biographical profiles and primary documents, a glossary of selected terms, a photo essay, and an annotated bibliography. In doing so, he draws upon an extensive knowledge and sophisticated understanding of the subject, its historiography, and what is involved in teaching it. And the result is a remarkably full realization of what series guidelines have called for, namely a reliable and readable book illuminating a “defining” historical event, up to date in its evidence and analysis, and so constructed as to serve both as a work of reference and a history in its own right. The book should be particularly useful for secondary-school- and college-student research, as preparatory reading for classroom discussions, and as a ready reference and introductory guide in public and academic libraries and on instructors' bookshelves.

This important book considers changes in the legal framework of business organization in England in the era of the industrial revolution. The significance of that theme has long been recognized, but it has grown over the past two decades because of increasing emphasis, within both economics and economic history, on the need to understand institutional contexts. That said, Harris is returning to often complex sources that have not been considered closely since W. R. Scott, A. B. DuBois, and N. C. Hunt in the first half of the last century. Moreover, he brings to the task a very wide range of skills. The result is a book for the times, but one that deserves to have a very long shelf life.