Editor's Introduction

This issue carries an implicit Black Lives Matter theme. We begin with Carl Sand-burg's poetic takedown of bronzed heroes on horseback, a fitting foreshadow of later battles over Confederate statuary. In the first of two research articles, Matthew Nichter reexamines the epochal Emmett Till murder case from a novel angle. From the day in early September when a train carrying his mutilated body arrived in Chicago to the trial of his alleged assailants a few weeks later in Sumner, Mississippi, members of Chicago's District 1 of the United Packinghouse Workers of America helped to lead a multiracial coalition demanding not only accountability for a horrific crime but a larger transformation of southern codes of racial subordination. In the second essay, Naomi Williams excavates local racial and class politics in Racine, Wisconsin. Avant la letter, it seems, Racine activists were building a powerful intersectional alliance.

Our Bookmark offers several lively commentaries on Thavolia Glymph's The Women's Fight. At the center of the narrative, Scott Nelson suggests, is the explosion of the plantation's militarized household, an event stretching across time told through "carefully pried-out stories [that] are a joy to read." Among them are riveting descriptions of the unannounced war between runaway slave women and plantation mistresses determined to wrest their former human possessions from the fragile protection of refugee camps. Elizabeth Varon neatly summarizes the main thrusts of the book's argument in its ambitious coverage of three discrete themes: the political consciousness of the enslaved women, the motivations of northern women, and the degree of class conflict separating poor southern whites from their enslaving neighbors. On the first point, she usefully quotes Glymph: "African American women [who] worked in support of the Union's war as nurses, cooks, spies, and laundresses … were all abolitionists. … They were Union women but unmarked as such; no one at the time called them that, and few have since." In the final comment, Andrew Zimmerman launches out from the specific findings of the book to launch a fusillade of charges against conventional political and military history as sources of the usual invisibility of Glymph's female, home-centered actors. The gendered binaries of homefront versus battlefront, soldiers versus civilians, and men versus women, he suggests, not only served (and continue to serve) a white patriarchy but also notably blind historians to the underlying realities of nineteenth-century warfare, from the contrasting battlefield strategies of Jomini and Clausewitz in Europe to Sherman's Civil War march to the sea. "The Women's Fight," Zimmerman asserts, "is part of a historiography of a better world."

Finally, in a revised version of her 2020 LAWCHA presidential address, Julie Greene takes up two major tasks. First, in light of well-developed literatures on race and gender theory, she asks, How much has (or should have) changed in how historians assess class relations? Second, in response to a shakeup in higher education institutions propelled by neoliberal economic pressures (now exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic), she presses for structural reforms and radical solidarities that will protect the most vulnerable among the academic workforce.

Just how prominent the racial-oppression-and-racial-justice theme is in current labor history scholarship is apparent from the issue's book reviews, assembled not by announced topic but by date of the review's completion. Of fifteen reviews, five treat African American themes, ranging in time from Caribbean slavery and marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp to the impact of the space race on the civil rights movement. In addition, two others focus respectfully on Anglo LA's incursion into its Mexican borderlands and the plight of Mayan immigrant meatpackers. The race question is also at the center of Charles Postel's searching deliberation on late nineteenth-century democratic movements (Equality: An American Dilemma), as skillfully interpreted by reviewer Kathleen Mapes.