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The article reviews the book, "All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement," by Carlotta R. Anderson.

The article reviews the book, "Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist," by Christopher Phelps.

The article reviews the book, "Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster," by Edward P. Johanningsmeier.

This speculative essay presents a preliminary statement on the paradoxical character of 19th-century class formation in the two white settler dominions of Canada and Australia. Outposts of empire, these social formations were early regarded with disdain, the one a classic mercantilist harvester of fish, fur, and wood, the other a dumping ground for convicts. By the mid-to-late 19th-century, however, Canada and Australia were the richest of colonies. Within their distinctive cultures and political economies, both supposedly dominated by staples, emerged working classes that were simultaneously combatative and accommodated. By the 1880s impressive organizational gains had been registered by labour in both countries, but the achievements of class were conditioned by particular relations of fragmentation, including those of 'race' and gender.

The article reviews the books, "True Government by Choice Men? Inspection, Education, and State Formation in Canada West," by Bruce Curtis, and "Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Canada," edited by Allan Greer and Ian Radforth.

The article reviews the book, "Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States," by Karen Orren.

The article reviews the book "Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America," by Michael Denning.

The article reviews and comments on "Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s: A Memoir," volumes 1 and 2, by Ernest Tate.

This article reviews the book, "The Practice of Solidarity: American Hat Finishers in the Nineteenth Century," by David Bensman.

This article reviews the book, "Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada," by Ian Angus.

This article reviews the book, "Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-1884," by Daniel J. Walkowitz.

This paper examines charivaris and whitecapping in 19th-century North America. Establishing the presence of the charivan/shivaree over the course of the century and of whitecapping in the years 1885-1905, the study examines two particular ritualistic forms of enforcing community standards and behaviour. Commonly directed against unnatural marriage, sexual offenders, wife beaters, and those who defied acceptable standards of behaviour (including employers and strikebreakers), charivaris and whitecapping posed the threatening order of custom against the rule of law. As such, they challenged, implicitly if not explicitly, a developing bourgeois hegemony. In studying them, we learn much about society and culture, order and disorder, in the 19th-century past, forces crucial to an understanding of the plebeian and working-class communities.

Provides an analysis of craftsmen throughout history and their connections to social and political radicalism. Examines the influence of skilled craftsmen on the trade union movement as well as the shifts the craft culture underwent over time. Argues that the craft tradition had a significant influence on the labour movement. Concludes by calling upon more historians to appreciate the social and cultural lives of these men and women, so as to uncover their hidden or unrecognized contributions to the modern world.

The article reviews the book, "Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution since the Age of FDR," by Donna T. Haverty-Stacke.

Daniel Drache has moved me to do what I have always avoided: respond to those who have distanced themselves from the interpretive direction of what they almost uniformly refer to as "the new labour history". The appearance of his article, "The Formation and Fragmentation of the Canadian Working Class: 1820-1920", in Studies in Political Economy no. 15 (Fall, 1984) - supposedly a socialist review that has, in the past, offered Marxist labour histories a warm, if critical, reception - was, for me, the last straw. --Author's introduction

This essay is an attempt to outline recent trends in the criminalization of working-class lives. It casts the net broadly, both historically and geographically, situating capitalist austerity's recent turn to mass incarceration in the United States and Canada in early 19th-century poor law sensibilities. What is happening now differs from the workhouse regime of industrial capitalism's new poor law, of course, but it has undoubted connections to this older regime of regulation. The new new poor law of our times is part of a long history of how dispossession has been pivotal to capitalism's project of uninhibited accumulation and suppression of those driven to defiance and dissent. It reveals how, as profit declines in the productive sphere, incarceration itself can be made to pay. The new new poor law is fundamental to contemporary capitalist political economy as the politics of austerity, the dismantling of the welfare state, and an assault on working-class entitlements and trade unionism are complemented by the rise of a prison-industrial complex. Driven by class antagonisms and racialized scapegoating, the new new poor law inevitably draws into its sphere of influence public-sector workers employed in the criminal justice system. It also unleashes intensified grievances of the incarcerated, stimulating the birth of movements of protest in which prisoners and proletarians search out ways of making common cause.

The article reviews the book, "Waiting for the Revolution: The British Far Left from 1956," edited by Evan Smith and Matthew Worley.

The article reviews the book, "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties," by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener.

Working Class Experience is a sweeping and sympathetic study of the development of the Canadian working class since 1800. Beginning with a substantial and provocative introduction that discusses the historiography of the Canadian working class, the book goes on to establish a general framework for analysis of what ultimately is a social history of Canada. Dividing the years into seven periods in the evolution of class struggle, it beings each chapter with an assessment of that period's prevailing economic and social context, followed by an examination of the many factors affecting the working class during that period. Written in a colourful and sometimes irreverent style, Working Class Experience focuses on the processes by which working people moved, and were moved, off the land and into the factories and other workplaces during the Industrial and post-Industrial Revolutions in Canada. Drawing on much recent work on contemporary capitalism, Working Class Experience offers a significant explanation of the malaise in current labour and management relations and speculates on its significance for progressive change in Canadian Life. --Publisher's description

Analyzes the crisis in Canadian Communism triggered by international developments including Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of the crimes of the Stalin era made in a "secret speech" in February 1956, and the Soviet Union's intervention later in the year to crush the revolt in Hungary. Calls attention to Karen Levine's article, "The Labor-Progressive Party in Crisis, 1956-1957, " published in the same issue, that was originally written as an undergraduate essay at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s.