Bryan Palmer,Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the History of Transgression [From Medieval to Modern]. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. 416 pp. $55.00 cloth; $24.00 paper.

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Bryan Palmer is a distinguished Canadian labor and social historian who in the 1970s published a history of skilled workers and industrial capitalism in nineteenth century Ontario. With Greg Kealey he edits the Canadian journal Labour/Le Travail. He has written a useful history of the Knights of Labor, and a text of Canadian labor history. Thus, he is both an original scholar and a helpful one. As the field of labor history gained an academic place with positions, grants, conferences, societies, and journals of its own, Bryan Palmer cultivated his interest in the methods of E. P. Thompson, whose “cultural Marxism,” moral and political commitments Palmer has done so much to maintain and define for a new generation. Economics and culture inhabited different parts of the university, if not different worlds of thought, where Marxism was torn in two. While Marxism remained alive to him, labor history and its travails receded from his direct view. Carrying forth the Thompsonian legacy, he re-positioned himself with direct interventions into the debates of his times. In 1990 Palmer published Descent into Discourse, a major intellectual intervention in the cultural wars. Palmer revised Thompson to allow the categories of race and gender in the history of the working class (Thompson was criticized for omitting them). Palmer writes about them not so much as labor power, but as “identities” or social subjects.