Trousson, Raymond / Vercruysse, Jeroom (dir.), Dictionnaire general de Voltaire. (Champion classiques, references et dictionnaires 18) 1272 p. 2020:10 (Champion, FR) <670-9>
ISBN 978-2-38096-016-7 paper ¥7,064.- (税込) EUR 38.00

Paiz, Christian O., The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement. (Justice, Power and Politics) 448 pp. 2023:1 (U. North Carolina Pr., US) <679-1545>
ISBN 978-1-4696-7169-7 hard ¥21,344.- (税込) US$ 99.00 *
ISBN 978-1-4696-7214-4 paper ¥6,457.- (税込) US$ 29.95 *

The past decades have borne witness to the United Farm Workers' (UFW) tenacious hold on the country's imagination. Since 2008, the UFW has lent its rallying cry to a presidential campaign and been the subject of no less than nine books, two documentaries, and one motion picture. Yet the full story of the women, men, and children who powered this social movement has not yet been toldBased on more than 250 hours of original oral history interviews conducted with Coachella Valley residents who participated in the UFW and Chicano Movement, Filipino farm workers, bracero workers, and UFW volunteers throughout the United States, this stirring history spans from the 1960s and 1970s through the union's decline in the early 1980s. Christian O. Paiz refocuses attention on the struggle inherent in organizing a particularly vulnerable labor force, especially during a period that saw the hollowing out of virtually all of the country's most powerful labor unions. He emphasizes that telling this history requires us to wrestle with the radical contingency of rank-and-file agency-an agency that often overflowed the boundaries of individual intentions. By drawing on the voices of ordinary farmworkers and volunteers, Paiz reveals that the sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic story of the UFW is less about individual leaders and more the result of a collision between the larger anti-union currents of the era and the aspirations of the rank-and-file.

Pearson, Chad E., Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century. 336 pp. 2022:11 (U. North Carolina Pr., US) <679-1546>
ISBN 978-1-4696-7172-7 hard ¥21,344.- (税込) US$ 99.00 *
ISBN 978-1-4696-7173-4 paper ¥7,535.- (税込) US$ 34.95 *

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers and powerful individuals deployed a variety of tactics to control ordinary people as they sought to secure power in and out of workplaces. In the face of worker resistance, employers and their allies collaborated to use a variety of extralegal repressive techniques, including whippings, kidnappings, drive-out campaigns, incarcerations, arsons, hangings, and shootings, as well as less overtly illegal tactics such as shutting down meetings, barring speakers from lecturing through blacklists, and book burning. This book draws together the groups engaged in this kind of violence, reimagining the original Ku Klux Klan, various Law and Order Leagues, Stockgrowers' organizations, and Citizens' Alliances as employers' associations driven by unambiguous economic and managerial interests. Though usually discussed separately, all of these groups used similar language to tar their lower-class challengers-former slaves, rustlers, homesteaders of modest means, populists, political radicals, and striking workers-as menacing villains and deployed comparable tactics to suppress them. And perhaps most notably, spokespersons for these respective organizations justified their actions by insisting that they were committed to upholding "law and order."Ultimately, this book suggests that the birth of law and order politics as we know it can be found in nineteenth-century campaigns of organized terror against an assortment of ordinary people across racial lines conducted by Klansmen, lawmen, vigilantes, and union busters.

White, Ahmed, Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers. 360 pp. 2022:10 (U. California Pr., US) <679-1547>
ISBN 978-0-520-38240-4 hard ¥7,535.- (税込) US$ 34.95 *

A dramatic, deeply researched account of how legal repression and vigilantism brought down the Wobblies-and how the destruction of their union haunts us to this day. In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World was rapidly gaining strength and members. Within a decade, this radical union was effectively destroyed, the victim of the most remarkable campaign of legal repression and vigilantism in American history. Under the Iron Heel is the first comprehensive account of this campaign. Founded in 1905, the IWW offered to the millions of workers aggrieved by industrial capitalism the promise of a better world. But its growth, coinciding with World War I and the Russian Revolution and driven by uncompromising militancy, was seen by powerful capitalists and government officials as an existential threat that had to be eliminated. In Under the Iron Heel, Ahmed White documents the torrent of legal persecution and extralegal, sometimes lethal violence that shattered the IWW. In so doing, he reveals the remarkable courage of those who faced this campaign, lays bare the origins of the profoundly unequal and conflicted nation we know today, and uncovers disturbing truths about the law, political repression, and the limits of free speech and association in class society.

Barba, Lloyd Daniel, Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California. 352 pp. 2022:8 (Oxford U. Pr., US) <679-121>
ISBN 978-0-19-751656-0 hard ¥28,028.- (税込) US$ 130.00 *

Sowing the Sacred traces the development of Pentecostalism among Mexican-American migrant laborers in California's agricultural industry from the 1910s to the 1960s. At the time, Pentecostalism was often seen as a distasteful new sect rife with cultish and fanatical tendencies; U.S. growers thought of Mexicans as no more than a mere workforce not fit for citizenship; and industrial agriculture was celebrated for feeding American families while its exploitation of workers went largely ignored. Farmworkers were made out to be culturally vacuous and lacking creative genius, simple laborers caught in a vertiginous cycle of migrant work. This book argues that farmworkers from La Asamblea Apostolica de la Fe en Cristo Jesus carved out a robust socio-religious existence despite these conditions, and in doing so produced a vast record of cultural vibrancy. Examining racialized portrayals of Mexican workers and their religious lives through images created by farmworkers themselves, Sowing the Sacred draws on oral histories, photographs, and materials from new archival collections to tell an intimate story of sacred-space making. In showing how these workers mapped out churches, performed outdoor baptisms in grower-controlled waterways, and built and maintained houses of worship in the fields, this book considers the role that historical memory plays in telling these stories.