Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas最新文献

{"title":"The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism","authors":"Ron Schatz","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329989","url":null,"abstract":"Before reading Jennifer Delton's book, I thought of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as a parochial, nationalist, protectionist, conservative organization that fought furiously against unions and was founded by midsized midwestern companies in the 1890s to promote American manufacturing goods overseas. This view, which I imagine is common among labor historians, is not entirely accurate. The NAM was more complicated than that, as Jennifer Delton demonstrates in her highly informative study of the association from its founding until today.To begin, although the large majority of the association's members were small and midsized manufacturers, it also enrolled the presidents of the largest manufacturing corporations in the United States. During its most influential period, in the early twentieth century, it was led by David Perry, who owned the country's largest carriage-manufacturing plant. Perry's factory covered six city blocks in Indianapolis and employed 2,800 workers. Perry also owned and directed other companies. Small companies paid low annual dues to the NAM; large ones paid far more and, not surprisingly, carried greater weight in the association's decision-making. The NAM was not exclusively midwestern either. On the contrary, the initiative for the association came from southern manufacturers as well as Ohioans; consequently, the membership encompassed both Republicans and Democrats. The formation of the NAM in 1895 was part of the larger bonding of southern and northern institutions a generation after the Civil War. It is also a mistake to view the association as systematically protectionist. Denton explains that the NAM was often internally divided on the question of tariffs, as one would expect from a mixed group of southern and northern manufacturers, and consequently often opted not to take a stand on that subject.The NAM led the Open Shop Drive against AFL unions beginning in 1903 and remained unqualifiedly hostile to unions through the mid-1930s. Over time, however, the association's leaders and staff moderated their stance. While some of the members never changed their views, the NAM staff who helped shape the Taft-Hartley Act conceded the legitimacy of unions and collective bargaining in exchange for sharp limitations on union practices. Denton describes the 1947 law as “a peace of sorts, a settlement, in NAM's long-running war against big unions” (136).By the 1980s the NAM was led by a Democrat: Alexander Trowbridge, an Allied Chemical executive who had previously served as secretary of commerce in the Johnson administration. Its chief economist, Jerry Jasinowski, was a former aide to Senator Hubert Humphrey, who in that capacity had helped craft the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978. Although the association opposed that law, NAM leaders testified in favor of affirmative action policies in the 1970s and 1980s and even earlier strove to persuade its members to hire, retain, and promote African America","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea","authors":"Michael Seth","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10330047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10330047","url":null,"abstract":"The labor movement in Korea played an enormously important role in the anticolonial/nationalist movement before 1945 and in the democratization of South Korea. Labor's significance has long been recognized by Korean historians, but most of their studies have been from a class framework that focused on men. As Hwasook Nam, in her new book Women in the Sky, states, women industrial workers (yŏgong)—their struggles, contributions, and issues—have largely been invisible. This is no longer true, however, thanks to Nam's work and that of Chun Soonok, Janice C. H. Kim, Seung-Kyung Kim, Theodore Yoo, and others. Historians now recognize that women were often at the forefront in the movement for labor rights, and for democracy and social justice while dealing with issues of gender. This book provides further evidence of this fact.Nam's book covers the women in the labor movement from around 1930 to the 2010s. It is not a survey; rather, it focuses on specific episodes and on the remarkable women associated with them. The book examines the early rubber industry in Pyongyang in the early 1930s. It also explores the labor struggle at the Choson Spinning and Weaving plant in Busan, 1951–52, and surveys women laborers in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. The book ends with the labor movement in the period of democratization and neoliberalism, when women found themselves overrepresented in nonunionized, contingent, precarious, and low-paid jobs, with a focus on a shipyard strike in Busan.Nam's research has uncovered some dramatic moments and fascinating people that illustrate the issues and roles of women in Korean labor history. She begins with her first “woman in the sky,” Kang Churyong, a rubber plant worker who on May 30, 1931, climbed to the top of the Ulmil Pavilion, which overlooked a major square in Pyongyang. While perched precariously high above, she made an eloquent, impassioned speech to astonished onlookers about the hardship that recently imposed wage cuts would bring to workers and their families. Nam ends with another “woman in the sky,” the labor activist Kim Jin-Sook, who “shocked society” with a thirty-day sit-in atop a tall crane in a Busan shipyard to draw attention to workers’ grievances. In between these two incidents, the author presents other women who spearheaded labor activism. For example, the author narrates the “extraordinary struggle of women factory workers” during the politically oppressive 1970s, when President Park Chung Hee assumed near-dictatorial powers and brutally suppressed dissent (151). Laborers at that time who attempted to organize strikes were met with physical violence at the hands of company thugs and riot police. But Nam only briefly mentions the most famous incident, the female-led strike at the YH Trading Company that was a catalyst for the unrest that preceded Park's assassination by his security chief. This brief treatment of such a key incident follows a pattern in which Nam focuses more on the lesser-known","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135345205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On","authors":"Matt Garcia","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329904","url":null,"abstract":"It has been some time since I read Herbert Gutman. My version of Work, Culture, and Society, a dog-eared, used copy that I bought in the early 1990s to prepare for graduate qualifying exams, had taken on a mustiness that sent me into a sneezing fit as soon as I reopened it. They say you never know as much as the day after those exams, and in this moment, I felt the wisdom of that observation. What I remembered was that Gutman had been the foundation of the new social history in the 1970s and that a generation of labor historians in the 1980s saw him as the American equivalent of E. P. Thompson, though I recalled little else. I hoped that my handwritten notes on six-by-four index cards stuffed inside the front cover would help rekindle my memory of what made him relevant to my studies, and my generation of graduates, three decades ago. No luck. My scribbles only captured the broadest outlines of Gutman's arguments, plus a cryptic message about the “collective passivity” of Lowell mill girls that I must have picked up from his essays.As I reread it, I noted how conditions in the economy and emphases in labor history had changed since his time. Reflecting on economic transitions and labor resistance in the nineteenth century, Gutman evoked this history in a moment of despair among workers in the 1970s that had yet to be fully interpreted by scholars or union leaders. Organized labor had begun a retreat in those days that culminated in the fateful PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) strike in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan broke the union by firing air traffic controllers for violating his return-to-work order. Before he died at the far-too-young age of fifty-seven in 1985, Gutman contributed two significant books, his monograph The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 and his collection of essays in Work, Culture, and Society, both in 1976. He separated himself from previous generations by abandoning a focus on trade unionists and instead writing about a culture of adaptation and resistance among workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly immigrants and African Americans.I remember that Work, Culture, and Society was seen by my graduate professors as a paean to the American workers who first exercised their conscience as a laboring class by engaging in everyday acts of resistance to exploitation. This had been the foundation of the approach taken by a generation of scholars just ahead of me, perhaps no one more influential than Robin D. G. Kelley, whose Race Rebels taught us to respect the “infrapolitics” of everyday workers who had received scant attention from historians prior to the 1990s.1 His celebration of the resistive power of McDonald's workers reminded me of my time on the grill at my local franchise and inspired me to write about the origins and variety of working-class culture among mostly Mexican people living and working “East of East” Los Angeles in Southern California.2St","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic","authors":"Seth Rockman","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10330032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10330032","url":null,"abstract":"Reckoning with Slavery has several simultaneous goals: to foreground numeracy in the early modern articulation of racial difference, to rethink Western modernity as a product of Black erasure, and to center the commodification of African and African-descended people in the history of capitalism. At its core, though, the book seeks to provide an intellectual and social history of enslaved women as clear-eyed analysts of the system of economic extraction built on their childbearing capabilities. To follow the strategic choices that Black women made within hereditary slavery, then, is to witness the theorization of racial capitalism in real time.Writing with insight and subtlety, Jennifer Morgan knits together the disparate historiographies of “racial ideology, economics, and the political lives of enslaved people” (17). Morgan, who has been at the forefront of Black feminist scholarship of the early modern Atlantic since the publication of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004), carries forward many of the commitments of that original work, while also expanding the field of inquiry to range across the Portuguese, Spanish, and English empires. Readers familiar with the earlier work will notice other departures as well. If fantastical depictions of nursing West African mothers had previously undergirded European race-making, the focus here shifts to Africans’ supposed inability to calculate correctly. The quantifying tendencies gathering in European thought under the umbrella of “political arithmetic” lent themselves to theories of African deficiency and were then deployed to justify the enslavement that followed. Europe's “newly consolidating ideas about wealth, nationhood, and population” presumed the potential value of African women's future reproduction, positioning the Black womb as always already commodified and in the service of colonial ambitions (111). Morgan makes it impossible to unsee this fixation within European political economic writing, and in doing so she advances an argument for recognizing capitalism and anti-Black racism as mutually constitutive.Morgan further entangles capitalism and race-making by foregrounding kinship, which was central to the formulation of enslavement as a hereditary condition but also at the core of a legal regime of private property that facilitated the intergenerational transfer of wealth. Generations of white prosperity would come to hinge on generations of unborn Black children transformed from “kin to inventory” (107). As Europeans denied that the affective ties of kinship held any meaning for African people, they invented another arena for articulating racial difference and an intellectual rationale for shifting enslaved women's children “out of the conceptual landscape of families and onto the balance sheets of slave traders” (134). Here Morgan suggests that racialized slavery has shaped the modern boundaries of public and private. As constructed in the early modern West,","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"93 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135345203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Popular Politics and Epidemics in Eastern Arabia","authors":"Laura Frances Goffman","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329820","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329820","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As communities tried to make sense of COVID-19, media outlets around the world reached for illustrative examples of past pandemics. In Qatif, a city on Saudi Arabia's Persian Gulf coast, memories of a 1970 quarantine surfaced in local media as the pandemic unfolded. This article investigates why COVID-19 prompted public remembering of a state-imposed cholera quarantine in Qatif in 1970 by reconstructing three formative assemblages of disease and popular politics. First, a 1953 speech by leftist activist Nasir al-Saʿid in the wake of massive strikes demonstrates how activists rhetorically connected the labor movement in Eastern Province with popular demands for health care. Second, the shift from neglect of localized epidemics to the state's expanding reach into quotidian life from the 1940s through the 1960s shows how even as public health developed as a tool of governance, local people interpreted medical services as manifestations of privilege and inequality. The final section explores how expanding state authority over Eastern Province and the state's embrace of coercive epidemic management converged on the regime's 1970 cholera quarantine in Qatif. In the twenty-first-century COVID-19 response, public memory of the 1970 quarantine has provided a space for people to articulate competing narratives. Linking together these constellations of health and politics renders visible patterns of repression and protest in a public sphere that typically silences histories of dissent.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135345207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On","authors":"Stacey L. Smith","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329890","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329890","url":null,"abstract":"It has, admittedly, been a long time since I have read Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. The essays in this volume were foundational to my PhD training at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an alma mater I share with Gutman, and I remember them as core texts in the labor history seminar that I took there as a second-year graduate student. As time went on, though, my research interests during my dissertation work and as an early career professor seemingly took me far afield from Gutman's emphasis on working-class formation and culture. I primarily identified as a historian of the US West and of the US Civil War and Reconstruction. My research, which dealt with unfree and quasi-free labor systems in California from the 1850s to the 1870s, did focus on work and workers. But as with many other Civil War and Reconstruction historians, my preoccupation has almost always been with the state. I want to know how labor and immigration exclusion policies shaped the lives of workers; how workers engaged with the state by contesting these laws and policies; how the state acted violently against workers; and how the outcomes of these struggles changed the overarching political history of the United States during Reconstruction.Given my research commitments, my first impression on rereading Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America was dissatisfaction at the weak emphasis on the state. There was precious little about the law, politics, and judicial proceedings that were at the heart of my own interpretations of labor history and inherently central to the Civil War and Reconstruction.In fact, one of Gutman's most provocative claims in the title essay of this volume is that the Civil War and Reconstruction may not have mattered all that much in the broader scheme of labor history. Gutman purposely disrupted the familiar periodization of national history that pivoted around the Civil War and Reconstruction as major turning points. Instead, he treated the period from 1843 to 1893 as a single unbroken era characterized by continuity, “common patterns of behavior,” rather than change.1 The “profound tension” between “American preindustrial social structure and the modernizing institutions that accompanied the development of industrial capitalism” remained the constant theme of American life, relatively uninterrupted by the Civil War and its aftermath.2After quieting my initial kneejerk protest—how could Gutman possibly discount the impact of emancipation and the Reconstruction amendments on labor history?—I gave serious thought to his argument about continuity across the pre–and post–Civil War periods. I concluded, to my surprise, that Gutman was ahead of his time in questioning whether the Civil War and Reconstruction were actually moments of tremendous rupture in national history.For decades, historians had emphasized that the United States victory over the Confederacy during the Civil War resulted in the consolid","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement","authors":"Joseph E. Hower","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329932","url":null,"abstract":"For those who came of age within driving distance of Baltimore's National Aquarium in the 1980s, a field trip or family vacation to the gilded new harbor was a rite of passage. Decades later, The Wire offered an award-winning, precedent-breaking counterpoint, depicting the systematic corruption and institutional failure that deindustrialization and divestment had wrought.While scholars have long recognized the interrelationships between the two souls of cities like Baltimore, they have rarely been explored with the kind of nuance offered by Jane Berger. Artfully integrating analysis of the political economy of the Rust Belt city with the community activism of predominantly Black welfare and human service workers, A New Working Class turns on the most unusual of declension narratives. The book's drive comes less from the erosion of a once-proud manufacturing sector than from the rise and fall of a public sector—led, “redistributive approach” to local development (3). In part a response to frustrations born of the midcentury movement's struggle to access positions in a dwindling industrial sector and in part a reflection of the ambitions of growing Black political power in the city, this vision turned on more than simply securing enough government posts to offset the manufacturing job loss, Berger argues. Rather, it reflected a deeply held belief among Black activists that public employment could serve as a mechanism to shape social policy implementation and improve the quality of public services.Though that idea had older roots, Berger argues, the Great Society's combination of increased funding and cooperative decision-making lent an unprecedented opportunity to Baltimore's Black activists to shape social policy at the local level—much to the chagrin of the city's still predominantly white elected leadership. The story of how radicals seized on the mandate for “maximum feasible participation” and transformed antipoverty initiatives like the Community Action Program into further-reaching challenges to the status quo has been told before—by Susan Ashmore, Noël A. Cazenave, Alice O'Connor, and others. What distinguishes A New Working Class is how it weaves its account of bureaucratic infighting and civil rights protest with that of a rising public sector labor movement. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 44 and the Baltimore Teachers Union emerged, sometimes awkwardly, as among the most effective critics of the very programs its members were employed to deliver. Though insufficient to meet the challenges created by decades of underinvestment and industrial job loss, the efforts of organized, militant, and disproportionately Black women workers helped secure meaningful advances in socialized services and partially alleviated the racialized and gendered burdens of life in the city.Yet even at its height, the solidaristic alliances between unionized “client advocates” and the city's low-income communities rested on the m","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135345206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"La solidarité et ses limites: La CFDT et les travailleurs dans “les années 68”","authors":"Joseph A. McCartin","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10330089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10330089","url":null,"abstract":"Despite important recent work, US historians still have much more to learn about the interaction between unions and immigrants in the years since the 1960s. One indication of this lacuna is that it is difficult to cite a US study that combines both a national narrative and a fine-grained local analysis of the subject as well as Cole Stangler's revealing new volume does for the case of France in the 1960s and 1970s.Stangler's story is enlightening on multiple levels. He focuses not on the largest French union federation, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), but on its smaller rival, the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), which, he convincingly demonstrates, took a much more aggressive approach to defending immigrant workers during the crucial years between 1965 and 1979.The CFDT was founded in 1964 when the bulk of unionists in the Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens (CFTC) broke from the Christian orientation of that federation to establish the CFDT on a secular footing (déconfessionnalisation). The timing of this founding was propitious. The Algerian War had recently ended; immigrants were moving to France from Eastern and Southern Europe and North Africa, increasing the proportion of immigrants in the French population from 4.7 percent in 1962 to 6.5 percent in 1975; and the nation was on the brink of the upheaval of 1968, which would famously bring workers and students together into the streets of Paris.Holding a “conférence nationale des travailleurs immigrés” in 1966, the CDFT set out to study the problems of immigrant workers and define a plan for organizing them. It then made a historic accord with the rival CGT that allowed each federation to influence the other on the immigration issue over the ensuing decade. The upheaval of 1968, which saw immigrants take to the streets alongside the French-born, crystallized sentiment among the CDFT's leaders to make immigrant organizing a priority.In the early 1970s, the CDFT strengthened its position on immigrants around the notion that “in the realm of capitalism, we are all immigrants” (au royaume du capitalisme, nous sommes tous des immigrés; 67), setting up “groupes de nationalité” to bring workers together in caucuses of their country of origin and joining with the CGT in a campaign against racism that in 1972 helped achieve passage of the Plevin Law, which criminalized racially discriminatory hate speech. That same year, the government agreed to an expansion in labor rights, allowing all foreign workers to be elected as shop stewards. By 1973, the CDFT was supporting the demands of Tunisian immigrant strike leaders threatened with expulsion for being undocumented (“sans papiers”) and was making immigrant rights central to its program (76).During these years, Stangler shows, the CDFT led the CGT in embracing the cause of immigrant workers. Unfortunately, however, the work of both federations was thrown on the defensive by the election of Valéry Giscar","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor's Introduction","authors":"Leon Fink","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329736","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Social Histories of Iran: Modernism and Marginality in the Middle East","authors":"Kaveh Ehsani","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329975","url":null,"abstract":"This book, by a leading social historian of modern Iran, is not an integrated and chronological general history but, as the title suggests, a collection of six case studies, five of which were previously published as articles and book chapters. Together they offer provocative insights into how modernity and social and political marginality were experienced in Iran and the wider Middle East. They cover the formative late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during which Iran experienced major social and political upheavals of global significance, including two major revolutions, military invasions and occupations by imperial powers, the emergence of oil capitalism, the Cold War, major land reforms, and the forced de-veiling of women by the Pahlavis and their re-veiling in the Islamic Republic, among others. Cronin challenges two prevailing trends in the historiography of Iran. The first is the nation-state-centered approach that frames Iranian history as exceptional and unique to its national territory and populations. The second are the top-down state and elite-centered frameworks that overlook the role of the subaltern classes and ordinary people in shaping this contested modernity. Instead, Cronin aims to unpack the agency and historical experiences of the poor, women, political activists, prostitutes, bandits, criminals, slaves, provincial and rural populations, workers, and small traders in navigating often violent historical transformations that shaped contemporary Iran and the Middle East. Throughout the book, Cronin links the national with the regional and the global to show how Iranian history has always been an integral part of currents beyond its national borders.Each chapter covers a different topic, ranging from the paradoxical role of secular revolutionary forces in the 1979 “Islamic” Revolution to the moral economy of food and the politicization of hunger under the Qajar dynasty; the political and social dynamics and public perceptions of criminality and the dangerous classes amid rapid social change, slavery, and abolitionism in Iran and the wider Middle East; and anti-veiling campaigns and the politics of dress. The great strength of the book is its comparative approach, placing Iran's modern social history within the larger context of Middle East and global histories by challenging “the routine fracture that separates the analysis of the national history of Iran from its global context” (2). “Methodological nationalism,” as the author calls it, is a significant issue that plagues academic studies and popular perceptions of Iran, as Cronin demonstrates in the first chapter (and only previously unpublished case study). The 1979 revolution was one of the largest social revolutions of the modern era. It was the result of a sustained and largely nonviolent mass movement against the monarchy that eventually triumphed through popular protests and general strikes. Yet instead of garnering intellectual and political curiosity like other ev","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135345204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}