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Article: Industrial unionism as liberator or leash? The limits of "rank-and-filism" in American labor historiography.
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- March 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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American labor historians - like the movement whose history they chronicle - seem to have reached a crossroads of sorts. As the U.S. labor movement struggles to cope with the globalization of markets, the shift to a post-industrial economy, and the quickening erosion of liberal political forces, historians themselves are increasingly divided in their interpretations of labor's twentieth-century rise and decline. Heady enthusiasm gripped their field in the 1960s and 1970s when idealistic practitioners of the new labor history, impatient with unions that seemed to have become an integral part of the liberal establishment, broke from the hoary institutional approach of John R. ...