Tradition is understood as a subset of a central historical concern: social and cultural discontinuities in time and space. The historical study of social tradition is an important contribution to knowledge; it seeks to understand the ways in which groups (states, classes, communities, families) formalize, symbolize, and interpret the past—and how such visions shape the ways in which people interpret, accept, or resist present conditions and influence behavior in the future.

During a decade of constant turmoil in the 1870s, immigrant textile workers from Lancashire, England seized control of labor politics in the southern New England region of the United States. They were men and women who had immigrated in successive waves before and after the American Civil War to the United States, specifically to the textile cities of Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts and to the mill villages north of Providence, Rhode Island.

The study of patriotism and national identity, once left to the likes of Sir Arthur Bryant, has been rediscovered by the mainstream of British historians. One source of this change is the growing influence of anthropology and literary theory on the discipline, encouraging closer attention to ritual, myth, and language. Another is a renewed focus on the modern state and the mechanisms by which it “intervenes” in civil society.

From 1880 to 1980 the Pullman Company repeatedly turned to photography to shape the attitudes and behavior of its workers. It built the Pullman Car Works and adjoining town on the fringes of Chicago as a model industrial community with the goal of resolving the endemic conflict between capital and labor. However, despite its claim that the model town was intended as purely “practical” philanthropy—that is, that sanitary and beautiful conditions would increase profits by improving workers' performance and preventing strikes—Pullman could not achieve its goal without also creating affective bonds with workers.

The hand has long been a symbol of what makes human beings human. It is still used to convey this meaning, despite the decline of manual labor and the replacement of manual dexterity by machines, robots, and computers. A number of twentieth-century images remind us of the hand's labor power: for example, Fernand Leger's 1951 homage to Vladimir Mayakowsky, his earlier 1918 painting, “The Mechanic,” which is a veritable icon of the worker whose hand forms the dynamic compositional element (Fig. 1), and Diego Rivera's “Detroit Industry Frescoes,” where gigantic hands symbolize humanity's struggle with the material world. In European visual traditions, the iconography of the hand as labor power is imprinted by three types of images: Renaissance imagery, industrial allegory, and artisan and worker iconography. In Renaissance art, Michelangelo, in “The Creation” in the Sistine Chapel, reinterpreted the Biblical reference to God's breathing life into the world by adding the barely touching hands of God and Adam, thereby suggesting the virtue of active work. Industrial allegory, developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, emphasized the “bourgeois” view of work as a sign of goaloriented, planned achievement and success in the world, with the hand depicted as a tool that creates new tools and hence the organ that makes humanity the crowning work of creation.

For two days, October 25–26, 1991, about forty scholars—mostly, but not exclusively, historians—sat around a conference table in the Alumni Room of the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and discussed “Tradition and the Working Class, 1850–1950.” We came from nine countries (the largest delegations were from France and the United States) to participate in the third of what has become a tradition in itself among historians of the working class, an international colloquium sponsored by ILWCH and the French social history journal. Le Mouvemem social, and supported as well by the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. CNRS. and DAGIC.