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Award-winning author Gregory S. Kealey's study of Canada's security and intelligence community before the end of World War II depicts a nation caught up in the Red Scare in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and tangled up with the imperial interests of first the United Kingdom and then the United States. Spying on Canadians brings together over twenty five years of research and writing about political policing in Canada. Through its use of the Dominion Police and later the RCMP, Canada repressed the labour movement and the political left in defense of capital. The collection focuses on three themes; the nineteenth-century roots of political policing in Canada, the development of a national security system in the twentieth-century, and the ongoing challenges associated with research in this area owing to state secrecy and the inadequacies of access to information legislation. This timely collection alerts all Canadians to the need for the vigilant defense of civil liberties and human rights in the face of the ever increasing intrusion of the state into our private lives in the name of countersubversion and counterterrorism. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Stalin's Man in Canada: Fred Rose and Soviet Espionage," by David Levy.

Introduces five sets of documents that shed light on the early years of the Communist Party of Canada and the RCMP security apparatus that surveilled and infiltrated it. The materials include in-camera CPC bulletins and reports, transcripts of secret speeches by Pan-American Bureau agent Charles Scott to party members in Regina and Edmonton, RCMP correspondence with the UK's Special Branch, and RCMP security bulletins. The materials were released by the Public Record Office in London, England, and through a freedom-of-information request with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Concludes that the documents are indicative of the close relationship between Canadian and British security agencies and their joint preoccupation with the threat of international communism.

This essay attempts to place Canadian workers' 1919 militancy in a national and international context. Utilizing freshly compiled strike data and focusing on events outside of Winnipeg, the paper argues that the 1919 revolt was nation-wide and part of the international post-war revolutionary upsurge. The new prominence of women and immigrant workers, reflecting the drive for industrial unionism, is emphasized.

This essay is a contribution to the debate concerning the direction of social and working-class history. Comments are made on periodization, regionalism, ethnicity, and culture. Class analysis and the utility of culture for the study of Canadian workers are strongly defended.

Argues that skilled workers in the nineteenth century had more control than was previously realized. Examines three Toronto unions active from the 1860s to the 1890s: the Coopers International Union, Ontario No. 3; the International Typographical Union No. 91; and the Iron Molders International Union No. 28. Analyzes various incidents that demonstrated the power of the skilled workers’ unions. Concludes by discussing the arrival of new threats to workers' control: scientific management, the rise of large corporations, and the expansion of labour-saving machinery.

This article reviews the book, "History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History" by James R. Barrett.

The article reviews the book, "Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers," by Ahmed White.

Announces the launch of the Canadian Committee on Labour History's website and Michael Lonardo's Canadian labour history bibliography (English only), with the latter on the website of Memorial University. Sean Cadigan has joined the editorial team as assistant editor and Andrew Parnaby is doing an internship as did his predecessor Michael Butt. Donations were also received to establish the Eugene Forsey Prize for student essays on labour and working-class history and to continue the work on labour education.

The editor apologizes for the deletion of figures as well as an error on page 126 of the article, "Strikes and Class Consciousness," published in the Fall 1994 issue.

The editor takes note of two papers published in the journal as well as editorial board members who received awards.

Reports that two recent journal articles have received awards. Corrects the omission of the cover credit as well as a line that was dropped from the article, "With Our Own Two Hands," both published in the previous issue.

Discusses the articles, research reports, document and critique sections, and review essays published in the issue. Three papers from the Canadian Committee on Labour History's symposium in June 1992 are also presented. A paper published in v. 25 of the journal has received an award. A correction is made to page 324 of the previous issue, for which the editor apologizes to the review writer.

The article notes various articles published in the issue including on state security repression, security, and intelligence during the Cold War, state intervention in labour relations, women's role in the labour movement in Canada, and the rise of the Knights of Labor and the Salvation Army in the context of late Victorian working-class culture in Ontario. Two award-winning papers that were originally published in Labour/Le Travail are also reported.

Workers and Canadian History is a collection of twelve essays by Gregory Kealey, the recognized Canadian leader in the growing field of working-class history. Available for the first time in a single volume, the essays provide an extensive study of various trends and themes in Canadian labour and working-class history, covering debates, major developments in historiography, and key events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kealey provides an overview of the study of workers in Canada as well as in-depth examinations of two of the field's leading scholars, political economist Clare Pentland and Marxist historian Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson. He analyses the development of Canadian labour history in particular and social history in general, and provides detailed empirical studies of the Orange Order in Toronto, printers and their unions, the Knights of Labor, and the Canadian labour revolt of 1919. The collection concludes with three synthetic views of Canadian working-class history focusing on the labour movement, the role of strikes, and attempts by the state to manage class conflict. --Publisher's description. Contents: Part 1: Antecedents. Writing about Labour -- H.C. Pentland and Working-Class Studies -- Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson: Canadian Revolutionary and Marxist Historian. Part 2: Debates. Labour and Working-Class History in Canada: Prospects in the 1980s. -- The Writing of Social History in English Canada, 1970-84. Part 3: Studies of Class and Class Conflict. Orangemen and the Corporation: The Politics of Class in Toronto during the Union of the Canadas -- Work Control, the Labour Process, and Nineteenth-Century Canadian Printers -- The Bonds of Unity: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1900 / Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer -- 1919: The Canadian Labour Revolt. Part 4: Overviews. The Structure of Canadian Working-Class History -- Strikes in Canada, 1891-1950 / Gregory S. Kealey and Douglas Cruikshank -- The Canadian State's Attempt to Manage Class Conflict, 1900-48.

Argues that the Conservative government of Stephen Harper is rewriting Canadian history as a propaganda celebration of a "warrior state" while cutting funds for serious historical research.

Takes note of articles published in the issue including on the unskilled, the labour/non-labour of women and children, Canadian job loss over the last 30 years, the attitude and ideological underpinning of labour history writing, and the relationship between academics and the labour movement. Discusses the transfer of Canadian Security Intelligence Service records to the National Archives, which had been long promised. Access, however, remains problematic. Explains the increased cost of the journal subscription and two minor corrections to the previous issue are noted, including a book review by VSP rather than BDP.

Describes a visit to the collection of radical pamphlets, primarily 20th-century and mainly Canadian, at the library of the University of Prince Edward Island. The materials were filed by title on two ranges of eight-foot steel shelves running at least 50 to 60 linear feet. Housed at UPEI since the late 1960s, the collection came as part of the library's purchase of the stock of the Blue Heron Book Store in Toronto, which had been run by the bibliographer, Peter Weinrich. Included are at least 62 titles that pertain to communist party leader Tim Buck. [Note: The collection was later transferred to the Memorial University library. See the article, "The International Labour and Radical History Pamphlet Collection at Memorial University of Newfoundland," by Michael Lonardo, published in the journal in Fall 1994.

The editor notes that various aspects of women's work are explored in the special issue. Also noted is the article on historical researchers' use of Privacy Act, including issues arising from Access to Information and Privacy Acts. The editor updates on his own experiences in this regard.