This is a tale of two cities: Chicago and Paris. They were different worlds, one the gem of western Europe, the other the gem of the prairies, yet both had a working-class movement in the 1870s and 1880s that produced a unique set of historical events which have served a symbolic function of communicating between one side of the globe and another. To illustrate these events as they appeared to one continent from the other I will begin with Chicago and demonstrate how the Paris Commune served as a symbolic event which gave meaning to local political struggles in the Windy City. Then, as the Haymarket Affair of 1886 unfolds, I will shift to Paris and the left-wing press as it tried to translate Chicago events into something meaningful for French workers. If these were the best of times and worst of times for workers in the late nineteenth century, then it is worth exploring the uses of these events in the creation of a working-class language of internationalism.

This is, quite simply, a remarkable book. By setting out evidence of the power of reading and thinking among people who worked against odds to do so, Rose has written a moving tribute to the inquisitive imperative lodged in human minds. Rose charts the efflorescence of an autodidact culture, which reached its summation in the decades around World War One. His interests, however, are wider than that story suggests. Other historians have chronicled heroic struggles against adversity in selected working-class autobiographies, but Rose instead trains his lens on the inner life generated by reading, documented in literally hundreds of accounts: alongside first-hand narratives, some of them familiar to labor historians, he has examined library and school records, surveys, and newspaper accounts of the same subject. His ambit extends beyond working-class people to include the printed and aural material they ingested, along with publishing history (including the history of Dent's Everyman's Library), musical culture, the transmission of sex education, adult education, and Ruskin College. This is a book about “culture” in the widest, Arnoldian sense, and it is triumphant in its breadth and achievement.

The Southern Historical Association's 1998 conference was held November 12–14 in Birmingham, Alabama. Consistent with long-established patterns, the conference featured panels chiefly focused on colonial-era issues: slavery, the Civil War, regional cultural and social history, and southern politics. Still, one session and several individual papers presented research in southern labor history. Reflecting the conference's location at the hub of Alabama's industrial heartland, the panel addressed coal miners' contests with organized operators, first in unionizing drives surrounding World War One and later during the long 1977–1978 United Mine Workers' strike.

On May 15–17, 1998, over one hundred and fifty labor historians and union and student activists attended the thirtieth annual conference of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association (PNLHA) at Portland State University. The conference was cosponsored by the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center and over a dozen labor unions and other organizations.

In 1935 George Dangerfield published The Strange Death of Liberal England. This book, which soon became a classic of sorts, claimed to explain the passing away of a political tradition allegedly unable to thrive in the postwar climate. Nationalism, class politics, and militant trade unionism were the characteristics of the mature twentieth century. However, Dangerfield's condolences were premature. In April 1992, almost sixty years after the publication of this famous obituary, issue No. 7755 of The Economist appeared with a surprising cover illustration: It represented William Ewart Gladstone, the Victorian statesman, wearing a flowery (postmodern?) waistcoat and surrounded by the microphones of journalists obviously eager to pick his brain on the current political situation. The caption was: “A prophet for the left.” The leading article presented Gladstone not as a historical figure but as a model for the Labour party. This was certainly remarkable, especially after twelve years of Conservative governments which claimed to be intent on restoring some of the traditional values and policies associated with Gladstonian liberalism.S. Evans, “Thatcher and the Victorians: A Suitable Case for Comparison?,” History 82 (1997):601–20. After a century of political oblivion, old Gladstone had suddenly become fashionable again, and his mantle was apparently being fought over by the three main parties.

From December 10–11, 1999, the Department of History of the University of Salzburg, Austria, hosted around forty scholars to reflect on the combination of women, work, and the breadwinner ideology. The conference was cofinanced by the Austrian government. This can be called a significant gesture in a country where the extreme right-wing politician Jorg Haider recently proposed in his victorious election campaign to increase the child allowance for Austrian couples if the mother opted to stay at home. Should Haider's proposal be carried out, it would constitute yet another example of successful breadwinner ideology in practice. Indeed, western European society seems to have been trapped for centuries in set ideas on the division of work, care, and income between the sexes. But could this be an illusion?

The fifteenth meeting of the Latin American Labor History Conference (LALHC), held April 17–18, 1998, at Duke University, began with a session on the early twentieth-century labor history of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. In “Class, Ethnicity, and Gender: The Negotiation of Workers' Identities in Porto Alegre's 1906 ‘Strike of Twenty-One Days,'” Joan Bak (University of Richmond) used the surprisingly detailed contemporary press coverage to carefully reconstruct the discourses of class, ethnicity, and gender that marked one of the earliest generalized work stoppages in the capital city of Porto Alegre. The origin of the 1906 strike, she argued, grew out of three intersecting transitions: from an artisanal to an industrial mode of production; from largely hermetic ethnic communities to more heterogeneous ones with multiple ethnic groups cross-cut by an emerging class identity; and from an overwhelmingly male paid working force to one increasingly female. She demonstrated how the workers' experience as a class during the strike came to override other divisions at this critical juncture. To understand this process of class formation, she argued, one must study how appeals to ethnicity and gender interacted with this emerging class identity, and how each element served as a locus of contention and negotiation between workers and management.

Historians of the working classes used not to write about consumption per se. They wrote about leisure pastimes, subsistence, cooperativism, moral economy, material life, the standard of living, even popular culture. The fact is that the constitution of the “problem” of consumption as an object of historical study is relatively recent. And initially, rightly or wrongly, it was identified with comparatively affluent societies' notions of consumer behavior and with the individualistic acquisitiveness and antisocialist political stances that went with that identification. Indeed, consumption as the main line of approach to studying working-class conditions, community, and consciousness not only seemed ill-suited to understanding people living under regimes of penury, but deeply misplaced. Insofar as consumption was about class, it appeared to be only about the bourgeoisie or the false consciousness of workers succumbing to commodity fetishism and class envy. To write about the consumption habits of the working class, as if they were similar in motivation and form to the consumption of the elites, seemed therefore to undercut the notions of class formation and consciousness as defined by relations of production and hence to be antagonistic to the very project of writing a critical history of class relations.

Roughly fifty years after the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) purged communist-led unions from its membership, the Southwest Labor Studies Association met in San Francisco from April 29 to May 1, 1999, to reconsider the history and implications of this event and, more broadly, to attempt to untangle the connections between and among McCarthyism, anticommunist liberalism, and the political trajectory of organized labor during the postwar era. Bringing together labor activists, union members, and academics, panels considered these themes from a number of perspectives and methodological approaches. Papers focused on such topics as the dynamics of political repression, the effectiveness of liberal anticommunist politics for organized labor, and the role of the state in shaping the labor movement.

To scholars of labor and working-class history, police pose a problem—though, one less grave than the problem they pose to contemporary life in the United States, where roughly 10 percent of all homicide victims, and fully one-third of all people killed by strangers, die at police hands. How should police be categorized, and are they worthy subjects for the field? They are workers, of course, but they are also front-line agents of state repression and shock troops for capital. They remain robustly unionized, at least by US standards, but their unions are regressive and politically conservative, more concerned with shielding cops from accountability than with building solidarity. As individuals, many hail from working-class communities of color, but as a social and political category, their effect is to rationalize, reproduce, and fortify axes of racial and class difference. Their labor power is undoubtedly appropriated to produce surplus value, but is the exploitation they suffer superseded—or, to use a newly vexed word, “trumped”—by the work they do as exploiters?