Major recent work in US history has credited the New Deal with a dubious double legacy. One group of historians has shown how Roosevelt's domestic policies subsidized the consolidation of a political economy and culture of mass consumption, while another has described how his foreign policies generated the strategies and institutions of neoimperialism. Scholars have analyzed these developments in isolation, but this essay demonstrates that they were linked and synergistic. Working from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to the nascent program for multilateral international development, it argues that an integrated complex of New Deal domestic and foreign policies harnessed the rise of the United States as a “consumers' republic” to the forms of imperialism refined in Latin America in the thirties and forties and deployed globally after the war. This policy complex rationalized the global production of US mass-consumer prosperity, displaced the costs of the Keynesian rehabilitation of US capitalism abroad, and evolved to regulate the metabolism between domestic mass consumerism and international hegemony after 1945.

The article presents a narrative of technological change, privatization, and globalization as they have affected Brazil's telecommunications industry. It is divided into three parts: A) A brief account of process of privatization in the telecom industry in Brazil; B) An analysis of the changes in work and employment relations in the industry; and C) A discussion of the implications of these changes for unions, focusing on problems they face and the strategies they are adopting to overcome their difficulties. A final section presents the implications of the article's findings, which are based on semistructured interviews with industry managers and workers and published company and union documents.

Transnational labor migration is one of the most visible features of our globalizing world. The International Organization for Migration estimates that there are 214 million migrant workers crossing national borders in the world today. Migration both in and to the Middle East constitutes an important part of this movement of laborers and has deep roots. In the mid-fifteenth century, workers across a broad spectrum of occupations, including stevedores, boatmen, and bakers, trekked from areas in eastern and central Anatolia to the new imperial Ottoman capital, Istanbul, where they lived and worked for months and even years. Workers from outside the Middle East also have been part of the fabric of life in the region for several centuries, the slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa, which long supplied labor for a variety of purposes, being one of the most notable. Migrant workers took on new significance in the twentieth century, especially after the oil price hikes of 1973. Today the nations on the Arabian Peninsula, the destination for most workers, have the highest ratio of migrants to locals in the world.

Buried within the bowels of Russia's Ural Mountains, some sixteen hundred kilometers east of Moscow, lay huge deposits of the invaluable raw material iron. If exploitedon a large scale, they would provide the Russian state with one of the chief ingredients of an early industrial economy. A prospering iron industry, in its turn, would expand immeasurably Russia's hitherto-limited war-making capacity—no small consideration in the early eighteenth century, an age in which war-making was still deemed the major function of the ambitious ruler. Appropriately, no Russian was more alert to the potential of Ural iron than Peter I, whose reign of some thirty-five years (1689–1725) would be distinguished by only one year completely free of war.

Over many years, academic journals on both sides of the Atlantic have carried articles debating the current state and future direction of labor historiography. One area of continuing discussion, central to the notion of a division between an “old” and a “new” labor history, is the importance of unions. As a consequence, historians of different persuasions are now more openly making judgments as to the value of the extensive body of industrial relations literature. This essay is a contribution to that particular discussion and an attempt to give it a more directed focus.

This article focuses upon the local cultures of Liverpool and Belfast, two cities wracked by recurrent communal sectarian strife. My analysis contributes to a growing appreciation of the locality and region as sites of accommodation, negotiation, and resistance to “nationalizing forces.” I argue that in Liverpool secularization and democratization contributed to local Tory Democracy's loss of control over popular sectarianism and to the subsequent development of a dynamic working-class movement that generated sustained Protestant-Catholic violence. In contrast, Ulster Unionism largely contained and controlled sectarian violence in Belfast. With the national threat of Irish Home Rule, the movement intervened, drawing Protestant working-class activity away from the street into “representative” structures, which were designed to harness and “police” popular sectarianism. Consequently, I examine whether the growing nationalization of British political culture from 1880 to the 1920s exacerbated or contributed to the resolution of entrenched sectarian strife within the two cities.

The first conference of the European Labour History Network (ELHN) took place on December 14–16, 2015, in Turin, Italy. It was, for the time being, the culmination of a development that has been going on for a number of years. Increasingly European labor historians work together across borders. Since the 1970s the number of research projects comparing two or more national cases has grown considerably, while in recent years transnational connections have attracted more attention as well. Likewise, labor historians now take Europe's imperial, colonial, and neocolonial past very seriously, and therefore the labor dimension of that past is explored more intensely (chattel slavery, indentured labor, convict labor, and so on).

Comparative studies of social policy usually portray the French welfare state as lagging behind most of its counterparts in Western Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. The sheer complexity of the French system, moreover, with its baroque mixture of separate private, government and quasi-public funds, made it exceptional as well. Yet tardiness and complexity by no means prevented the French from expanding social insurance at an especially rapid clip in the decades following the Second World War. By 1980 France spent more on social security as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product than any country in Europe except Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. Today the French are among Europe's most stalwart defenders of publicly funded pensions and health insurance. Given its unimpressive beginnings, how did the French welfare state become such a heavyweight?

The ninety-third annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) took place in St. Louis, Missouri, from March 30 to April 2, 2000. Surprisingly, few panels addressed labor history at the OAH, but those that did proposed new and exciting ways of rethinking the field, emphasizing new narratives for the history of labor in the United States and the inclusion of new areas of investigation.

Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore have offered us two distinct arguments, one persuasive, the other anything but. There is much to be said for their proposition that the political coalitions that instituted New Deal reforms, far from being the historic culmination of an inexorable march from laissez-faire to the welfare state, were fragile and limited from the start and crumbled beyond the possibility of retrieval after 1970. Much more dubious is their contention that the basic explanation of both the limits and the defeat of the New Deal is to be found in a political culture of individualism, which they claim has circumscribed the political life of the United States from the nation's founding to the present.

Historians of labor and working-class life face a powerful public amnesia; they seek to recover a past of struggle for economic security and dignity at work that is all too often obscured or even suppressed by consensual accounts of American history. Public historians necessarily work against similar lapses in popular memory. Historian Max Page has invoked the oppositional character of public history, which he asserts, “should by all rights be a radical undertaking. For, at its heart,” Page continues, “public history is about bringing history to a wider public, about challenging citizens out of complacency about their past and creating spaces for forgotten stories to be told.”

Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore have written an ambitious and provocative essay. Ranging across more than a hundred years of history in less than half as many manuscript pages, it seeks to unlock deep secrets of the American past. The New Deal, Cowie and Salvatore argue, constitutes a lone “long exception” in a history otherwise determined by “a deep and abiding individualism” so definitive of U.S. political culture that it dooms any radical rupture in advance. Presenting themselves as realists, Cowie and Salvatore claim that their interpretation of the long sweep of national history “can provide a more stable intellectual foundation on which to build discussions of present and future politics.” I disagree, and the reasons why matter.