The industrial and labor history of France in the interwar years is legitimately the stuff of Marxist romanticism. You have the transformation of France from an artisanal to an industrial economy; the introduction of Fordism, Taylorism, and scientific management; the concomitant sweating and deskilling of the labor force; and a crisis in accumulation that culminates in the rise of a job-control-conscious proletariat in the Popular Front. Das Kapital never played out so tidily anywhere else.

At first sight, a study of French artillery engineers from the Ancien Régime to Napoleon may seem far afield for labor historians. If labor history focuses on how political conflict and struggle mediate relations among labor, capital, and states, then Ken Alder's magnificent study is a signal contribution.

This is the second installment of Kulczycki's examination of the Polish working-class diaspora in the Ruhr Valley, the coal-rich region in the west that, like Upper Silesia in the southeast, belonged to Prussia. Both the Ruhr and Upper Silesia contained significant Polish populations. Coal mining and steel production in these two regions fueled first Prussia's and then, after 1871, Imperial Germany's rise as a Great Power. Mention of “the Polish-German antagonism” will invariably bring to mind the tense history of Polish–German diplomatic relations leading up to the outbreak of World War Two and the ensuing apocalypse. The post-1918 border conflicts between Germany and Poland, especially the bloody struggle in Upper Silesia, might also come up. Depending on the audience, the roughly four million Prussian Poles in Poznania and Western Prussia could also receive attention. However, it is unlikely that the Polish population in the Ruhr would be recognized, at least on this side of the Atlantic, as a distinct group with its own chapter in the history of Polish–German relations. Yet in 1914 there were roughly one hundred thousand Polish miners in the Ruhr, comprising about a quarter of the work force.

Since 1990, scholars in Russia, Europe, and the United States have organized a series of conferences dedicated to reconsidering key problems in the history of prerevolutionary Russia, bringing together emerging generations of historians from both sides of the old divide. This volume presents the results of a 1995 conference held in St. Petersburg and contains twenty-four papers. In addition, the discussion that followed each session of papers is also reprinted and provides important insight into the nature of post-Soviet historical debate surrounding Russian working-class history.

This study is a valuable addition to the growing scholarship on women's experiences since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Between 1991 and 1996, Professor Racioppi, a political scientist, and Professor See, a sociologist, conducted extensive interviews with leaders of the emerging Russian women's movement. They then incorporated the fruits of the interviews into a more general discussion of the development of that movement since the late 1980s. The resulting book is an informative, thoughtful, and very useful study.

In European Proto-Industrialization, Ogilvie and Cerman give us a handy guide to this important theory of economic and social development, and to its fate as scholars tested its precepts in the early modern history of western Europe, eastern Europe, and the Nordic countries. The book's brevity is a great asset for students and scholars alike, since it outlines intelligently the basic themes and mutations of proto-industrialization. Franklin Mendels originated this idea, which describes the early stages leading to the modern Industrial Revolution, when he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s. His theory drew a direct link from the cottage crafts produced in the European countryside to the nineteenth-century factory industry organized by modern entrepreneurs. In the early modern period—the late fifteenth century to the late eighteenth century—merchant capitalists began to orient their resources toward the new mercantile frontiers across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Toward the very end of his opus magnum, Sassoon cites the French philosopher Alain: “When I am asked whether the division between Left and Right still has any meaning, the first thought which comes to my mind is that the person who asks the question is not on the Left” (776). Sassoon never asks that question, and it shows throughout the text. He unabashedly states that after one hundred years of socialism, many reforms have been obtained but wage earners “have not increased their control over their conditions of work at a pace remotely comparable to the expansion of political democracy, the increase in material prosperity, the extension in social welfare, or the advance in science and technology” (758). Almost everyone still has to give up most basic rights when entering their place of employment. Likewise, in this postmodern age of the retreat from class as a category of analysis, Sassoon criticizes converts to identity politics, who assert that frequently re- and decomposing groups of people are “ephemerally constructed through discourse” (649), with such brief but unmistakable rejoinders as: “Classes were not disappearing; they were changing” (658). Sassoon's thoughts on neoliberalism and globalization may be gauged by his succinct comment that the most recent “unleashing of market forces as a solution to mass unemployment” should be regarded as “a monument to human folly” (456).

Mothers' pensions were an important chapter in the story of American welfare state development. Thus far scholars have focused their analysis at the national level. However, fiscal and administrative control over pensions typically remained at the local level. Because of this, an understanding of the implementation and consequences of mothers' pensions requires the sort of local-level analysis undertaken by Joanne Goodwin.

The Female Economy is an apt title for this study because it offers a conceptual framework for understanding a neglected aspect of US economic and social history. Dressmaking and millinery formed a female economy within the business world, an enclave in which women proprietors employed women in a variety of capacities and served female customers. Gamber emphasizes that analysis of this female economy challenges much conventional wisdom about women's employment and patterns of consumption. She argues that contrary to business historians' assumptions, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the business world was not exclusively male. Not only were women “there,” but, as in wage labor markets, “hierarchies of gender” (2) as well as hierarchies of class, ethnicity, and race characterized commerce too. Moreover, social scientists who assume that mass production and large-scale retailing replaced custom work neglect proprietors, employees, and customers who participated in the creation of custom goods well into the twentieth century alongside factory production and department stores. Also, scholars who portray women as uniformly unskilled, low paid, and temporary workers overlook dressmaking and millinery, which resembled prestigious male crafts more than other female occupations. Finally, popular literature reinforced popular ideologies asserting that business was inappropriate for respectable women and inaccurately portrayed proprietors of millinery and dressmaking shops as “pathetic victims,” working-class “upstarts,” or women of ill repute (6).

In the early twentieth century, as city councils throughout the South began passing Jim Crow segregation laws, African Americans began organizing streetcar boycotts. These boycotts, aimed at the racist new laws which required African Americans to sit in the back of the streetcar, were organized in more than twenty-five southern cities, and some lasted over a year. In some cases the boycotts were so well organized they spawned alternative transportation companies which were owned and run by African Americans. Although the boycotts failed to reverse the tide of Jim Crow legislation, the participants displayed a sophisticated understanding of their own consumer power, as well as a willingness to use that power to transform their political situation. As one African-American activist in Lynchburg, Virginia, explained the logic behind their streetcar boycott in 1906: “Let us touch to the quick the white man's pocket. 'Tis there his conscience often lies.”

Thomas J. Sugrue's excellent book begins and ends with the defining moments in the history of Detroit: the effects of the Second World War and the riot of 1967. By tracing deindustrialization, unemployment, and ghettoization to the immediate postwar era, Sugrue's analysis of the history of Detroit challenges the idea that its economic downturn began with the riot of 1967. He casts doubt on the common assumption that Detroit's decay and that of other northern industrial cities began in the late 1960s or early 1970s. To the contrary, Sugrue demonstrates that the postwar boom was uneven in the US and that northern and midwestern cities began losing industrial jobs in the 1950s. Today Detroit is an extreme case of what is happening and has happened in many Rust Belt cities. The urban crisis, according to Sugrue, is longstanding—more chronic than acute.

Working-Class Hollywood examines the content, the audience composition, and the organization of the silent movie industry from the nickelodeon era beginning in 1905 to the arrival of sound at the end of the 1920s with an epilogue on working-class movies since then. Steven Ross focuses on the depiction of the working class and of labor–capital struggles based on an exhaustive survey of silent films. He discusses the growth and changes in the movie industry which explain the modifications in treatments of class in movies, and how labor organizations responded to commercial images of class in their own movie productions.

The People's Lobby is a pathbreaking book that uses organizational sociology to reinterpret the decline of the party system and the birth of interest-group politics in the United States at the beginning of this century. In a striking blend of rigorous empirical research and innovative use of institutional theory, Elisabeth Clemens crafts a challenging analysis of the remaking of American political culture, one which emphasizes the agency of ordinary people working through popular organizations. Simultaneously a synthesis of decades of historiography and a bold reinterpretation, this work poses a challenge which every future scholar of twentieth-century politics and political movements will have to take into account.

Hal S. Barron's Mixed Harvest is an important addition to recent work on the social repercussions of corporate consolidation, the growth of state power and professional expertise, and the spread of an urban-based consumer culture in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—what Barron calls the “second great transformation.” His book is inspired by the belief that rural people have been neglected in the historiography of this epochal shift, which tends to focus on urban developments and the crucial role played by modernizers and reformers committed to professional and bureaucratic agendas. Too often, Barron argues, rural people are depicted as passive objects acted upon by middle-class professionals and reformers—or as militant “traditionalists” opposed to everything modern, clinging stubbornly to an outmoded way of life. The aim of Mixed Harvest is to restore their agency and examine their ambivalent responses to the changes occurring in their midst.

The intersection of culture and politics has long been of interest to historians, but, until now, few have examined the ways in which modern dance expressed a radical political vision, and few have done this as well as Ellen Graff has in this study. Indeed, the central theme in Stepping Left is the moment when dance and politics joined together in what Graff terms a “revolutionary dance movement.” This moment proved to be “fleeting,” however, and it was quickly forgotten as modern dance became institutionalized (177).

On May 3, 1998, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran, then later retracted, a story alleging that in Central America Chiquita Banana secretly controlled “dozens of supposedly independent banana companies to avoid restrictions on land ownership and limit unions.” The article also criticized the company's indiscriminate use of pesticides on its workers, “and other questionable practices” (New York Times July 17, 1998, A1 and A16). A labor history and brief for human rights, Myths of Ethnicity and Nation lends distressing credence to that newspaper's coverage, arguing that the banana industry routinely violates labor laws and fundamental human rights. Analyzing labor practices, immigration policies, nationalist ideology, regional realpolitik, and transnational capitalism, Mark Moberg demonstrates the complex links among labor, capital, ideology, and justice.

This volume gathers essays on a wide range of cases, from Argentina to Mexico, in the period from 1930 to 1979. In the main, the authors are young scholars—often graduate students—sharing the results of their recent investigations. If nothing else, Workers' Control in Latin America shows that old-style labor history is still vibrant in the region. The classic works of Harry Braverman, David Mont-gomery, and Richard Edwards still resonate among Latin American scholars.

A good book about Peronism is always a reason to celebrate, and McGuire's book is cause for celebration. In spite of the fact that Peronism, the political movement created by Juan Domingo Perón, has largely determined the political and historical processes in Argentina during the second half of the twentieth century, it has not been a matter of scholarly debate. It could be said that Peronism has been much more a matter of opinion than an object of systematic study.

Probably no other country in recent decades has experienced economic reversals of fortune as dramatic as South Korea's, rising from economic “basket case,” in the estimation of the US State Department, to economic “miracle” in the 1960s and 1970s, but now mired in an economic crisis with no easy end in sight. Kim's Class Struggle or Family Struggle? examines the people who, more than any other single group, bore the burden of South Korea's transformation from agricultural backwater to industrial powerhouse: young, low-wage, female factory workers. Specifically, Kim focuses on workers in the Masan Free Export Zone (MAFEZ), established by the Park Chung Hee military government in 1970 to spearhead South Korea's new export-led industrialization program.

François Manchuelle reverses some of the most venerable images associated with migrant labor in Africa and in the capitalist world generally. The book focuses on men from a small region in the interior of West Africa, near the Senegal-Mali border, who were among the first to enter into wage labor and who to this day constitute a disproportionate part of West African migrants to the urban centers of the region, as well as to Marseille, Paris, New York, and other world cities. Manchuelle did not find that Soninke were the victims of land loss, uprooted communities, impoverishment, excessive taxation, or coercion. Nor did he find that extensive male migration weakened the sense of attachment to the community of origin.