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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.

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.

This article offers a preliminary theoretical statement on the law as a set of boundaries constraining class struggle in the interests of capitalist authority. But those boundaries are not forever fixed, and are constantly evolving through the pressures exerted on them by active working-class resistance, some of which takes the form of overt civil disobedience. To illustrate this process, the author explores the ways in which specific moments of labour upheaval in 1886, 1919, 1937, and 1946 conditioned the eventual making of industrial legality. When this legality unravelled in the post-World War II period, workers were left vulnerable and their trade union leaders increasingly trapped in an ossified understanding of the rules of labour-capital-state relations, rules that had long been abandoned by other players on the unequal field of class relations. The article closes by arguing for the necessity of the workers' movement recovering its civil disobedience heritage.

The article reviews the book, "The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1960s," by Maurice Isserman.