The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 set off huge global processes that are still unfolding. Terrorism has been placed on the center stage of world diplomacy, international political configurations have been realigned, and a war in Afghanistan has toppled the government. Within the United States, everything from security arrangements to budget priorities to the cultural mood have been transformed. But the September events had a local dimension too: New York and Washington, D.C. experienced them as immediate, horrendous disasters.

Semptember 11 transformed our collective lives in seemingly unimaginable ways. As I write this, six months to the day of the attacks, I still get chills thinking about what happened that day to my city. We will remember where we were on September 11 like many still remember where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

After the tragic events of September 11, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani at once saw parallels in the London Blitz, the German air campaign launched against the British capital between September 1940 and May 1941. In the early press conferences at Ground Zero he repeatedly compared the bravery and resourcefulness of New Yorkers and Londoners, their heightened sense of community forged by danger, and the surge of patriotism as a town and its population came to symbolize a nation embattled. His words had immediate resonance, despite vast differences between the two situations. One reason for the Mayor's turn of mind was explicit: he happened at that moment to be reading John Lukacs' Five Days in London, although the book examines the British Cabinet's response to the German invasion of France some months before bombing of the city got underway. Without doubt Tony Blair's outspoken support for the United States and his swift (and solitary) endorsement of joint military action also reinforced this mental coupling of London and New York. But the historical parallel, however imperfect, seemed to have deeper appeal. Soon after George W. Bush was telling visitors of his admiration for Winston Churchill, his speeches began to emulate Churchillian cadences, Karl Rove hung a poster of Churchill in the Old Executive Office Building, and the Oval Office sported a bronze bust of the Prime Minister, loaned by British government.Mayor Giuliani's televised press conferences immediately after the September 11 attack. “Churchill Mania,” The Economist Nov. 10, 2001. See also, N. Ferguson, “The War on Terror is Not New,” New York Times, Sept. 20, 2001. “Bush Tours the New York Battlefield,” The Times (London), Sept. 15, 2001, 1. William Farish, the American Ambassador in London, thanked the British people for their “magnificent” response to the terrorist attacks and said that Americans now looked to the bravery of the British during the 1940 Blitz bomb attacks as an example of how to “prevail over an implacable foe.” The Times (London), Sept. 21, 2001, 2. An additional curious development was press reports that W. H. Auden's poem “September 1, 1939” (which begins in “I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street/Uncertain and afraid”) was enjoying popularity on National Public Radio, in internet chat rooms, and even high school discussion groups. This quickly prompted a heated exchange of letters in the Times Literary Supplement about the merits or lack thereof of Auden himself and his poem. J. Lukacs, Five Days in London: May 1940 (New Haven, 2001).

In less than a minute on a summer evening in 1944, an earthquake reduced the city of San Juan to rubble, leaving ten thousand dead and half the province homeless. The worst natural disaster in Argentine history, the tragedy was an indictment of the old political order and a spur for the new order to come.On June 4, 1943, a military coup overthrew the last of the fraudulently elected democratic governments that had ruled Argentina since 1930. The military denounced not only the deposed regime but the liberal democratic order itself as fundamentally unjust and corrupt, proclaiming a need for social justice under authoritarian rule. Here the recently-installed military regime had its first chance to deliver on promises of social justice, as the little-known secretary of labor, Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, directed a massive relief campaign and commissioned ambitious plans for rebuilding. The social project to build a new citizenship was launched together with the spatial project to build a new city.

Guatemala was already a disaster when a 7.5 Richter scale earthquake hit the country on February 4, 1976. Economic development based on low-wage large-scale capitalist agriculture for export and low wage industrial growth had not improved life for the majority of Guatemalans, who were and are among the poorest people in Latin America. To make matters worse and to protect wealth from the growing protests of the poor, national political power rested on legal and extra-legal state violence. Between the time when the Unites States engineered a coup against the reformist government in Guatemala in 1954 and February 4, 1976, state violence had taken the lives of 25,000 Guatemalans, a figure slightly larger than the approximately 21,000 killed in the 39 seconds of the 3 AM earthquake.

In one horrifying night and through the long misery of nearly eighteen years of injustice that have followed it, the city of Bhopal in India can be said to have experienced the head-on impact of world historical and political economic processes. In 1969, Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) set up a plant to manufacture the pesticide Sevin in Bhopal, with the permission and, indeed, the encouragement of the Indian government. This was the heyday of the Green Revolution, introduced in India in the mid-1960s and based on HYV (high-yielding variety) seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and vastly increased irrigation. The disastrous social and environmental consequences of this technological choice (made by Indian planners,This was done at least partially in order to avoid the political vulnerability that dependence on imported foodgrains might bring. Marshal Windmiller, conversation with one of the authors. with backing from international agencies such as the World Bank and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations) are well documented,See, for example, Vandana Shiva, Violence of the Green Revolution (New York, 1991). but it is not always remembered that the Bhopal gas tragedy has its roots in the same narrative. The design of the Bhopal plant, as well as the policies relating to its maintenance and operation, were in keeping with the double-standard often applied by transnational corporations in their Third World outposts, where environmental, worker, and community safety issues may be seen as less pressing than at home.For detailed accounts of the corporation's disregard for safety standards at the Bhopal plant, see David Dembo, Ward Morehouse and Lucinda Wykle, Abuse of Power. Social Performance of Multinational Corporations: The Case of Union Carbide (New York, 1990), 87–91; Ward Morehouse and Arun Subramaniam, The Bhopal Tragedy: What Really Happened and What It Means for American Workers and Communities at Risk (New York, 1986), 2–8; Ruth Norris et al., Pills, Pesticides and Profits, (Croton, NY, 1982).

On September 11, 2001, elevator starter Arlene Charles helped her coworker and shop steward Carmen Griffith, who had been severely burned on her face and hands, down seventy-eight flights of stairs. Security worker Gabriel Torres helped evacuate frightened tenants and then led two firefighters through the building in a search for more victims; they were trapped under falling debris and dug out two hours later. Window cleaner Jan Demczur, stuck in an elevator between floors with five other men, burrowed through the wall with his squeegee, and the men made it out of the building minutes before it collapsed. The Service Employees International Union told their stories on its website (www.seiu.org).

Soon after the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, New York City pundits, fiscal watchdogs, and politicians began to speak of a fiscal crisis looming over the city. Some compared the situation today to that of the city's last major fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s. In a New York Times editorial, Felix Rohatyn, the former US ambassador to France and prominent financier who played an important role during 1970s crisis, went so far to warn that the city possibly faces a worse crisis today than it did over twenty years ago.Felix Rohatyn, “Fiscal Disaster the City Can't Face Alone,” New York Times, October 9, 2001, A25. With such ominous talk came discussion of the possible need for large-scale layoffs, wage freezes, and significant cuts to the city's social programs.

Since September 11, Americans, we are told, have adapted to the “new normal.” It's a curious phrase, implying as it does a rupture with an “old” normal that knew neither disaster nor tragedy. The traumatic power of the terrorist attacks invites us to forget how much of the present has, in fact, been shaped by the fires, epidemics, accidents, and upheavals of the past. New York City's development in particular has been punctuated and defined by a litany of horrific events. Two new digital resources for teaching and research underscore the role of both tragedy and its memory in the making and remaking of the city's economy, politics, and citizenry.

This study examines the ambitions for higher education of women who grew up in working-class families in Minnesota and attended the University of Minnesota between 1950 and 1985. Most historical studies of the recent past have ignored the experiences of working-class women and considered them to be marginal to important changes in women's lives generally. This study argues that as early as the 1960s working-class college-bound women were developing an important critique of patriarchal relationships within and outside their families, and that their ambitions for college were significant to the larger culture as they shaped new prospects for women's independence. The article analyzes oral history narratives alongside other social and cultural data, linking women's stories of upward mobility to broader historical patterns in the economy, popular culture, and working-class communities during these turbulent decades. It points to the pivotal role of class backgrounds and shifting gender identities in white women's construction of “success stories” in an era of growing access to higher education.

This article discusses the effects of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 on the timber industry in Southeast Alaska from the perspective of Alaska Native “choker setters.” Choker setters form lowest wrung on the logging production hierarchy, providing much of the labor involved in deep woods harvests. The argument that emerges from this material highlights the importance of a distinction between the relations of work and the relations of production in advancing anthropological notions of culture, while emphasizing the continuing importance of culture and meaning for understanding class-based social processes. The primary material for the article is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Southeast Alaska by the author.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the working world of African-American longshoremen in New York and how they came to terms with racist hiring practices. Some African-American longshoremen retained a degree of institutional freedom with their Jim Crow Local #968, but their inability to control a pier, and thereby guarantee steady work, resulted in a precarious situation of constantly searching for work. Nonetheless, Local 968 acted as a catalyst for direct attacks on their representative trade union and discriminatory employers. As will be seen, not all black longshoremen followed a path of confrontation; some attempted to find an alternative method of obtaining regular work. These longshoremen paid kickbacks, eagerly volunteered to work at a moment's notice, or consistently made themselves available for overtime. For all of these black longshoremen the record was a mixed one: at times successful in changing some hiring policies and union attitudes, at others painfully ignored or chastised for their efforts.

The durability of a two party system has been used as evidence of a popular consensus underlying American politics. Instead, I attribute the failure of third party movements to the American electoral system. By awarding election to the candidate with the most votes regardless of the total cast for other candidates, the simple-majority single-ballot (SMSB) system encourages rational voters to vote for the lesser-of-two-evils, their relative preference among the candidates perceived to have a chance of winning. In an SMSB electoral system, the two major parties will normally drift toward the political center to capture centrist voters needed for an electoral majority. By providing voters on the electoral extremes with an alternative, third parties brake the major parties' progressive moderation. Using election data from Massachusetts in the 1880s, I show that when the state's Republican Party drifted to the political right to hold upper-class voters (the “Mugwumps”), the Greenback-Labor Party attracted disenchanted working-class voters, especially those already mobilized by the Knights of Labor. Frightened by the loss of working-class voters, the Republicans enacted a new era in labor legislation in 1886 including a law providing for a state board of strike arbitration including representatives of labor organizations.

Since the publication of David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991), the study of “whiteness” has become a dominant organizing principle in US labor history as well as other fields. In the last eleven years, historians have churned out an innumerable number of articles and books using the concept of whiteness to reshape the way the field. On November 30, 2001, a couple hundred graduate students, academics, and activists packed a New York University hall to hear seven prominent scholars, who have written on both labor and race, debate the impact of whiteness studies on US labor history. The evening began with Eric Arnesen (University of Illinois at Chicago) offering his assessment. Arnesen was followed by the six other scholars who responded to him and offered their own views on whiteness studies. The editors of International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) organized this public forum because of the interest generated by the symposium on the same issue that appeared in the fall 2001 issue of their journal. Along with ILWCH, the event was sponsored by the New York University History Department and the Committee on Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. The forum was quite a success as the panelists and the audience engaged in lively and occasionally heated discussion on the relative strengths and political ramifications of whiteness studies.

To celebrate the fiftieth issue of Labour/Le Travail, scholars, unionists, and political activists from across Canada and from the United States, Australia, Ireland, and Brazil gathered in Peterborough, Ontario, from May 31 to June 2, 2002. Founded by the Canadian Committee on Labour History in 1976, Labour/Le Travail has been a central pole for the development of Canadian labor history and one of the world's leading labor history journals. Its jubilee issue provided a welcome occasion for considering the state of Canadian labor history, the challenges of putting out labor history journals, and political problems confronting workers and organized labor. Many of those present came from the generation that founded Labour/Le Travail, including Greg Kealey, Bryan Palmer, Joan Sangster, and other early editors, contributors and board members of the journal.

Bryan Palmer is a distinguished Canadian labor and social historian who in the 1970s published a history of skilled workers and industrial capitalism in nineteenth century Ontario. With Greg Kealey he edits the Canadian journal Labour/Le Travail. He has written a useful history of the Knights of Labor, and a text of Canadian labor history. Thus, he is both an original scholar and a helpful one. As the field of labor history gained an academic place with positions, grants, conferences, societies, and journals of its own, Bryan Palmer cultivated his interest in the methods of E. P. Thompson, whose “cultural Marxism,” moral and political commitments Palmer has done so much to maintain and define for a new generation. Economics and culture inhabited different parts of the university, if not different worlds of thought, where Marxism was torn in two. While Marxism remained alive to him, labor history and its travails receded from his direct view. Carrying forth the Thompsonian legacy, he re-positioned himself with direct interventions into the debates of his times. In 1990 Palmer published Descent into Discourse, a major intellectual intervention in the cultural wars. Palmer revised Thompson to allow the categories of race and gender in the history of the working class (Thompson was criticized for omitting them). Palmer writes about them not so much as labor power, but as “identities” or social subjects.

Susan Buck-Morss' recent book, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, is an ambitious if not audacious project. Spanning the disciplinary range of the humanities and social sciences, Buck-Morss has produced a work that is as much political theory and philosophy as it cultural criticism and intellectual history. In fact, this is her stated aim: to upset the disciplinary boundaries in search of a new way of conceptualizing the history of the twentieth century.

The term “home front,” as distinct from “war front,” is so familiar today that we tend to forget that the concept is less than a century old, a coinage of the First World War. Ironically, it was the very collapse of the familiar boundaries between military and civil sectors of society that prompted the invention of a term that purported to differentiate clearly between the “battle front” and the “domestic front.” In a war in which all sectors of society were directly or indirectly affected by the military conflict, the distinction between the actual combatants on the front lines and their fellow citizens in the factories, on the farms, and in the shops becomes, at times, difficult to determine. The novelty of appending the modifier “home” or “domestic” to the military term “front” captures the essence of “total war.” The First World War was fought not only in the trenches of northeastern France, but in the urban bread lines and the munitions factories, and in every town subjected to the aerial bombardments that literally demolished any real distinction between military and civilian life.

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) had been widely considered the most stable of the Soviet Union's allies. Yet, in less than six months beginning in the autumn of 1989, the seemingly solid East German regime went into crisis and in quick order the old GDR was absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany. In such a rapid and unpredicted transformation, one would have expected to see the sort of massive working class upheaval that marked the Solidarity movement in neighboring Poland. Yet, Nothing of the sort occurred. “Why not?” is the question that provides the focus of this superb study.

According to Angus Maddison, the last millennium turned out well economically; world population increased twenty-two fold, per capita income, thirteen fold, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), three hundred fold. In 1000 AD, the average infant could expect to live to age twenty-four, today, to age sixty-six. In recent centuries, the most rapid growth has been in Western and Central Europe, North America and Japan, but in the last fifty years, a “Resurgent Asia” demonstrates that catch up is possible. Not all the news is good. Growth has been unequal. In the last eighty years, the gap between the richest regions and the rest of the world has grown; in 1820 it was 2:1, in 1998 7:1.