Editor's Introduction

This issue features a special themed section on Eastern Europe plus several other delectable items. Section coordinators Rory Archer and Goran Musić offer us the fruits of a field-reshaping conference, titled "Workers beyond Socialist Glorification and Post-socialist Disavowal," held at the University of Vienna in 2018. Archer and Musić first present their own take on how and why the neoliberal years have both reawakened and transformed historical research on the region's "socialist" years. Then, they introduce three examples of fascinating new work being done in working-class social history of the region.

Our Bookmark highlights a newly published and long-neglected masterwork of anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo," originally written in 1927 based on Hurston's conversations with Cudjo Lewis (born Oluale Kossolo), one of the last living survivors of the Middle Passage, was controversial on several grounds. From the beginning of its partial appearance in article form, questions swirled about Hurston's ethics (and likely plagiarism), her method (and use of dialect), and her political unseemliness (particularly in exposing African involvement in the slave trade and internal black-on-black persecution in the United States). Whatever its complicating intellectual implications, however, the tragic journey of Cudjo Lewis speaks to us with rare and commanding power. As Eric Arnesen's preface indicates, we recruited three accomplished historians—Catherine Stewart, Jason R. Young, and Thavolia Glymph—together with gifted literary scholar and writer Darryl Pinckney to "cast light on Hurston, her encounter with Lewis, Lewis's life story, and the manuscript's fate."

As labor and unionization issues continue to roil campuses across the United States, our Contemporary Affairs posting provides a chance to look at a specific struggle from the inside out. With their perceptive interview of two Pennsylvania State College faculty leaders of a 2018 strike that idled five thousand union members across the Penn State system—"the largest faculty strike of its kind in recent memory"—historians and social movement scholars Gordon Mantler and Rachel Riedner probe both the psychology and the pragmatics of an initial union victory that has since been sealed by a further long-term contract signed in 2019.

Several major new contributions to an ever-evolving field are signaled in the Reviews. Among those most positively heralded are Anne Balay on queer truck drivers, James Barrett's personal set of essays, Adelle Blackett on domestic workers and the International Labour Organization, Scott L. Cummings on American port workers, Nan Enstad on tobacco imperialism, Michael Honey on Martin Luther King's labor message, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers on white women slave owners, and Eric Loomis's strike-centered perspective on US labor history.

Good reviews also offer the chance to learn something beyond what is contained within a book's covers. Two examples will have to suffice. With critical sympathy—accent on both words—Timothy J. Gilfoyle conveys the intellectual contribution of Dominique Kalifa's Vice, Crime, and Poverty in examining the nineteenth- and twentieth-century construction of the image of the criminal underworld. For social historians, however (says Gilfoyle), Kalifa goes too far. "Inequality … is not a simple representation, social imaginary, or cultural construct. … The 'informal economy,' the 'vice district,' the 'subaltern society,' call it what you want … were not simply linguistic creations of Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, or Edgar Allen Poe. They were grounded in real political economies and material cultures." Kornel S. Chang is equally appreciative of Marilyn Lake's seminal transnational study of US and (mainly) Australian reform streams in Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform. Her suggestion that the study of "indigenous histories in the context of settler colonialism might illuminate more broadly our understanding of progressivism" is, for Chang, particularly well taken. Yet, he wishes that the author had taken on the conventional wisdom residing in major works like that of Daniel Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings, as well as more of the scholarship from newer and younger scholars. He also wonders why Australia seems to have meant so much more to American progressives than other settler societies like New Zealand, Canada, or even...