The Argentine political system has provided a source of endless debate for scholars pondering the enigmas of this anguished nation. Thanks to media coverage of the current Argentine crisis, a concerned public around the world has become interested in understanding the roots of the country's recent troubles. Two new academic works provide excellent guides through the complexities of Argentine politics that will reward attention from specialists and a more general scholarly audience. Political scientist Nancy R. Powers explores popular reactions to Argentine democracy and neoliberal economics during the early 1990s. Focusing on events a century earlier, historian Paula Alonso investigates the rise of the Radical Party, an organization that became one of Argentina's two major parties in the twentieth century. Both authors offer rich accounts of political orders undergoing uneasy transitions.

Since the late 1970s, US and European consumers have enjoyed year-round availability of fresh grapes, pears, apples, and peaches in their local supermarkets—fruits that, in the winter months, come disproportionally from Chile. As the authors of Women and Agribusiness: Working Miracles in the Chilean Fruit Export Sector make crystal clear, this First World bounty is made possible through international agribusiness's hyper-exploitation of predominantly female labor in the Third World. Chile's highly profitable fruit-export industry was nurtured during Augosto Pinochet's military dictatorship (1973-1989), which promoted a radical liberalization of the economy and ruthlessly silenced a once powerful rural labor movement. Women comprise just over half of the estimated 300,000 temporeros/as (temporary workers) who labor for poverty wages under seasonal contracts in the industry's orchards, vineyards, and fruit-packaging plants. By the mid-1980s, the fruit industry's profits reached a half-billion dollars, making fresh fruit Chile's third most important source of foreign currency and prompting The Wall Street Journal to hail Chile's “economic miracle.”

Since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the United States and Mexico, the productivity of industrial workers in each country has increased while their real wages have fallen. Focusing on Mexico and measuring the results of NAFTA, Dale Hathaways' Allies Across the Border: Mexico's “Authentic Labor Front” and Global Solidarity explores the social ramifications of neoliberalism, its impact on workers in industrial and underdeveloped nations, and its implications for democracy and national sovereignty in poorer countries that recruit multinational firms through cheap labor and lax environmental and worker protections. Using the experiences of the Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), a grassroots labor union facing powerful domestic and international opposition as it seeks to improve working conditions in Mexico, Hathaway makes the case that worker solidarity across borders offers the most viable way to achieve a more broadly shared prosperity than is being created at present.

Let us be clear: although the author's reporting on the Zapatista movement (EZLN) and his personal interviews with Subcomandante Marcos and other insurgent leaders are at the heart of this book, this is not a book about the Zapatista uprising, nor even primarily about Chiapas. Given its title, the book begins rather disorientingly with a diatribe against the US Postal Service, the Bell Atlantic telephone company, and the New York utilities provider Consolidated Edison. When on page two we find the author yelling “Down with Bell Atlantic,” after paying his long overdue phone bill at a Bell Atlantic office on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the reader is set up to expect an off-kilter polemic against BIG BUSINESS.

These two books add to a growing body of scholarship connecting the tactics and strategies of the modern civil rights movement to the black protest campaigns of the New Deal and Second World War. While historians such as Harvard Sitkoff and Cheryl Greenberg have demonstrated the influence of New-Deal policies on African-American protest politics, Bates and Arnesen explore the important role that black unionists played in shaping the civil rights agenda. Bates focuses on A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). Arnesen examines the struggles of several black railroad unions. Ultimately, both authors skillfully demonstrate black unionists' influence over the race's struggle for equality, drawing particular attention to early civil rights activists' insistence that economic and political democracy were inextricably linked. But while the authors share similar assessments of African American railroaders' political significance, Arnesen's focus on multiple unions presents a more complete picture of the complex forces shaping black politics.

Paul Le Blanc's, A Short History of the U.S. Working Class: From Colonial Times to the Twenty-first Century is, in the author' s words, an attempt to show how “labor's militant minorities have sometimes contributed decisively to what has happened in our country.” It is, as well, an attempt to provide a “succinct” volume, a brief, usable history of working-class America and its importance in American historical development. The result is this slim volume that reads less as a history of working people than as a history of those who led worker's movements from colonial times to the present. This is not surprising given that much of Le Blanc's previous work concerns revolutionary leaders (V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg) and his active involvement in the labor struggle. But what this brief volume necessarily lacks in scope in its focus on leaders, it more than makes up for in its concise blend of economic, social, cultural and political history to form a readable narrative of US labor that is largely free of arcane jargon, and easily accessible to the non-academic reader.

Between World War One and 1970, millions of whites left the southern United States to move north. Those who relocated to the five states of the Old Northwest Territory are the subjects of Chad Berry's book. At the time of publication Berry was an Assistant Professor of History at Maryville College in Tennessee. He tells us that his own family participated in one such journey northward.

Southern labor history is replete with stories of defeat. In factory after factory, the defeat of southern workers' solidarity at the hands of industrial employers is one of the most enduring themes of the discipline. In Contesting the New South Order: The 1914–1915 Strike at Atlanta's Fulton Mills, Clifford M. Kuhn examines the defeat of textile workers at Atlanta's largest industrial employer from a local perspective. Kuhn is not the first historian to examine the 1914–1915 strike at Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill. Gary Fink's 1993 pioneering study, The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike of 1914–1915, presented a detailed analysis of the historic strike. Focusing on industrial espionage and efficiency, Fink uncovered the many ways in which the owner of Fulton Bag sought to control the lives of his employees and ultimately defeated the workers. Kuhn explores the strike from a different angle. He draws the history of the strike and the community of workers at the mill into a larger portrait of working-class life in Atlanta, a premier New South town. As a result, the voices of the workers resonate loudly throughout Kuhn's analysis. Drawing upon the unusually comprehensive and multi-faceted records of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, Kuhn presents a study that weaves a local story into the larger fabric of the region. The story of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill is unusual, not only for the strike itself, but for the fact that it offers a new urban environment in which to study the history of textile mills in the South. Kuhn's study traces the history of the company, its workers and the strike within a larger history of Atlanta and the New South.

Stephen A. Vincent's Southern Seed, Northern Soil challenges some of the cornerstone views of African-American migration to the North. By examining the migration of African Americans to the rural North in the nineteenth century, Vincent highlights the fact that African-American northern migration did not solely take place in the twentieth century, particularly after the start of World War One, and that all migrants did not move to northern cities. Vincent's welcome book focuses on the migration of free blacks from North Carolina and Virginia to two communities in Indiana in the 1830s—the Beech and Roberts settlements located in Rush and Hamilton counties. Vincent charts the southern precursors to this migration, the building of the Beech and Roberts settlements in Indiana, the success of these communities in the 1850s and 1860s, and then their decline that began in the wake of the Civil War and continued throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, almost all African Americans had left the Beech and Roberts settlements. Concurrently, these two communities began a new form of existence in the living memory of former residents as annual homecoming festivities were begun to celebrate “the neighborhoods' exceptional character and history.” These events, which continued throughout the twentieth century, became the “second phase in the communities' histories,” a phase that Vincent's book is certainly a part (151).

For some years now the efforts of labor organizers to establish interracial unions in the Jim Crow South—in longshore, in steel, and in numerous other industries—has been the subject of vigorous historical debate. Who took the initiative in such organizing efforts, white or African-American workers? What were their hopes and intentions? How did both white and black workers cope with the enormous social and political pressures that were exerted to keep the two races apart? Among others, Eric Arnesen in his book on New Orleans longshoremen and Michael Honey, writing about workers in Memphis, have provided extensive evidence of such racial cooperation.

One of the principal advances of the past generation of scholarship constructed around black workers' self-activity in the Age of Emancipation is renewed attention to the ways in which, for both master and slave, the race and labor questions were inextricably bound. Heather Cox Richardson's new study underlines the significance of that insight: faced with the disintegration of the free labor ideal in the cauldron of class conflict that was the post-war North, she argues, Republican misgivings over freed peoples' labor militancy, rather than an all-out retreat from the ideal of racial equality, best explains the capitulation of Radical Republicans and the collapse of Reconstruction.

Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism examines the home construction industry in antebellum Philadelphia and the men who sought to transform themselves from carpenters into what the author calls “master builders,” entrepreneurs who rose up from the artisanal ranks. Donna J. Rilling contributes to our collective body of knowledge about the fascinating, albeit little known, world of Philadelphia carpenters who doubled as entrepreneurs. She also has written a book with a narrow scope that fits uncomfortably with other works of antebellum America. In short, she has written an academic monograph, in the best and worst senses of the term.

This is an extremely rich and compelling study. Laurie Mercier adeptly explores the class, labor, and socio-cultural relations of Anaconda, Montana, the smelter town of the more famous Butte. Mercier's work insightfully underscores the importance of gender—in particular, the male breadwinner ideology—in the making and remaking of Anaconda's working-class world. During the early decades of the twentieth century, those prerogatives facilitated the creation of an overt public culture that celebrated and supported Anaconda's working-class community, in particular its male copper mill and smelter workers. Mercier shows how women in the community both challenged and preserved this order. Ultimately this study shows how that ideology weakened working-class communitarianism. That is, the strategy of male privilege shifted from being an asset to a deficit in the changing world of labor, class, and politics in the twentieth century.

Recently, several books and movies have brought Motown out of the shadows as Detroit and its history are scrutinized from a variety of angles. Prominent among the scholarly works is Thomas Sugrue's award-winning The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, which explores the question, how did a city—that was in the 1940s a shining boomtown—turn into a symbol of the tarnished American Dream within a few decades? While Sugrue's book is a major contribution for sorting out the forces that contributed to the transformation of postwar Detroit and moved the discussion of urban decay beyond ahistoric bromides attributing urban crisis to a culture of poverty, his scholarly treatment does not pretend to exhaustively cover all the social, political, and economic bases that influenced change in Detroit since 1945.