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Editor’s Introduction

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-3718362

1558-1454

Leon Fink,

Australian History and Society

Sometimes less is more. In revising our subtitle from Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas to the simpler Studies in Working-Class History, we are not so much changing focus as expanding it to accommodate what we might best call a selective globalism. Our continuing engagement with the recent transnational turn in historical studies (as well as abiding interest in labor internationalism) convinces us that a wider geopolitical scope is desirable if we and our readers are to keep up with some of the most stimulating intellectual currents in our field. New historical interest in labor systems beyond “free” wage labor, research in comparative labor and welfare policy, and the widespread if varied impact of globalization on the lives of contemporary working people all push for a broader literacy. Although our core readership and coverage will likely remain based in the Americas (and for practical purposes, US centered), henceforth we will adopt a global reach, so long as the international, transnational, comparative, and/or “exceptionally national” significance of the proposed contribution is made clear. Admittedly, we are imposing a higher test (to be determined by our editors) of comparative relevance for non-American subjects than for American ones. We look forward to further experimentation in the years to come, and we welcome your reactions and suggestions as we do so.To help chart these new intellectual horizons, we are pleased to welcome a few new associate editors: for South Asia, Ravi Ahuja, Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Goettingen, Germany; for Africa, Eric Allina, University of Ottawa; for Australasia, Marilyn Lake, University of Melbourne; and for Europe, Stefan Berger, Institute for Social Movements, Bochum, Germany. Another transition will necessarily interest all those who interact with Labor. Our stellar editorial coordinator, Adam Mertz, is moving on to complete an important dissertation on teacher unionism in Wisconsin. All who have enjoyed his devoted, patient, and unfailingly good-humored attentions to the journal will miss him even as we wish him well. Fortunately, we are blessed with a most able successor to Adam in Jeff Schuhrke, who is sure to leave an equally positive imprint on our pages.And now to the contents of volume 14.1. Fittingly, two articles suggest the rewards of the transnational/comparative turn in labor history. In the first, Steven Parfitt reviews the historiography on the US Knights of Labor before launching into an ambitious, if necessarily still introductory, inquiry into the organization’s impact abroad: beginning with a window-glass makers’ assembly in Cardiff, Wales, thousands of Knights organized across four continents, with particular strength, it seems, in Belgium and New Zealand. The similarity of the Knights’ message and even ritual to those of its Owenite forerunner, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, raises, for Parfitt, the fascinating hypothesis of an Anglo labor world wherein workers in the various British white settler states grappled with similar problems and solutions. Still, the differences in national expression and outcome are as intriguing as the similarities: why, for example, American Knights made so much more of women’s equality than all their distant counterparts is but one of many themes that Parfitt’s discoveries open to further inquiry.The complex management and manipulation of women in the workplace is precisely the subject of Joan Sangster and Julia Smith’s reconstruction of a telling chapter in Canadian business and social history. Seeking to expand its market share by an appeal to male business travelers in 1970, Canadian Pacific Air Lines largely convinced its stewardesses (including their union) to go along with a PR stunt that literally stripped flight attendants of unpopular midi skirts in favor of ogler-friendly minis. Sangster and Smith place this incident not only in the social-political context of its time but also in relation to a rich historiography on the sexualization of work, the international airlines and advertising industries, and women’s own ambivalent reaction to contemporary beauty culture.The issue’s Bookmark selection features a lively discussion of Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf’s recent award-winning book Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South. Following a helpful précis by Erik S. Gellman, a panel of experts generally express appreciation for the authors’ all-too-rare joining of labor and religious history—in this case a masterful review of the CIO’s ambitious but ill-fated Southern Organizing Campaign, aka Operation Dixie—especially their depiction of the CIO’s “fundamental” misconception of the average white worker’s evangelical disposition. Yet each also dissents at least in part from the authors’ main emphasis. Chris Cantwell, for example, wonders if the main problem was less that the labor leaders were riding the wrong evangelical horse and more that they overemphasized turning the labor movement itself into a religious mission. Julie Saville suggests that the “primitive”/modernist divisions among believers espoused by CIO organizers (and at least inadvertently adopted by the authors) might usefully have been reexamined in relation to African-American evangelical contemporaries. Robert Korstad insists that the CIO’s selection of white textile workers as its primary recruiting audience ultimately inflamed rather than tamed race as a factor in the unions’ defeat. Like Korstad, Jane Dailey argues that Operation Dixie’s determined avoidance of biracialism and the contemporary Left deprived the effort, however ultimately doomed, of its would-be strongest adherents. Genial and generous toward their critics, the authors, not surprisingly, are determined to hold their interpretive ground.As usual, the book reviews offer enticing introductions to many new treasures—from a revisionist portrait of the Gilded Age to country music and queers to the dear departed James Green’s masterful narrative of West Virginia coal wars, but in this space let me concentrate on the genre itself. The most compelling reviews are those that not only capture the central thrust of the book’s exposition and argument but also either embellish or challenge that argument with an insight of the reviewer’s own. Fortunately, there are several fine specimens to highlight here of which I will mention only two. Elizabeth Faue’s treatment of Holly Allen’s Forgotten Men and Fallen Women credits the book’s handling of the gendered tropes of New Deal programs, cultural constructions that regularly marginalized poor women as well as racial minorities in its imagery of working-class heroes. Yet as Faue indicates, the reader will search in vain for the pre–New Deal roots of such classifications as well as the impact (or lack of it) of the period’s labor movement. Jana K. Lipman likewise credits Sue Fawn Chung’s Chinese in the Woods for expanding the literature on the Chinese influence in nineteenth-century American economy to the lumber industry. Given the emphasis in much literature on the feminization of the Chinese workforce (namely restaurants and laundries), Lipman pushes for further evaluation of the cultural impact of Chinese lumberjacks. Moreover, given China’s role as a major importer of US lumber, Lipman asserts, there seems to be an opening here “for greater engagement with transnationalism.”Finally, just as this issue goes to press, come the results of a U.S. presidential election marked by unprecedented commentary on the political revolt of the “white working class.” By now we are aware that the contemporary appeal of such conservative “white nationalism” or (to pervert its original meaning) “populism” is itself both transnational and rooted in global political-economic forces that call for the utmost historical scrutiny. May we do our part to interpret these phenomena, and thereby to change them.