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

労働移民とスエズ運河の形成　1859～1906年
Carminati, Lucia, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906. 356 pp. 2023:8 (U. California Pr., US) <703-939>
ISBN 978-0-520-38550-4 hard ¥10,769.- (税込) US$ 49.95 *

Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said probes migrant labor's role in shaping the history of the Suez Canal and modern Egypt. It maps the everyday life of Port Said's residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal's northern harbor, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Lucia Carminati provides a ground-level perspective on the key processes touching late nineteenth-century Egypt: heightened domestic mobility and immigration, intensified urbanization, changing urban governance, and growing foreign encroachment. By privileging migrants' prosaic lives, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said shows how unevenness and inequality laid the groundwork for the Suez Canal's making.

Loiselle, Aimee, Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class. (Gender and American Culture) 320 pp. 2023:11 (U. North Carolina Pr., US) <703-1354>
ISBN 978-1-4696-7612-8 hard ¥21,344.- (税込) US$ 99.00 *
ISBN 978-1-4696-7613-5 paper ¥6,457.- (税込) US$ 29.95 *

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources-union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories-Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and their labor activism. While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are.

Arnold, Joerg, The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History. 352 pp. 2023:11 (Oxford U. Pr., UK) <703-1525>
ISBN 978-0-19-888769-0 hard ¥9,971.- (税込) GB￡ 35.00 *

The British coal industry no longer exists and yet the figure of the coal miner lives on in the British cultural imagination. In feature films and documentaries, miners are typically portrayed as proletarian traditionalists working in a dying industry. Taking this perspective, the 1984/85 miners' strike seems a desperate last stand against forces much bigger than the miners themselves -- not just the Thatcher government but the tide of historical change itself. In this ground-breaking study, Joerg Arnold challenges a declinist reading of the people working in one of Britain's most important energy industries. The study makes extensive use of previously inaccessible records to offer a new account of the British miner in the age of de-industrialisation. The book situates the miners in broader structures of feeling, and reconstructs the miners' sense of the past and the future. Arnold argues that Britain's miners went through a cyclical movement -- from loser to winner and back again -- as Britain underwent a de-industrial revolution in the final decades of the twentieth century. The book reinserts the industry's 'new dawn' of the 1970s into the story of coal and shows that the miners wielded real power. The industry's reversal of fortunes, inscribed in Plan for Coal (1974), proved short-lived. It was significant all the same. Its significance, the book argues, did not lie in affecting the long-term trajectory of the coal industry. Rather, the 'new dawn' was important in raising the political and cultural stakes. The miners found themselves at the centre of sharply conflicting visions of the future at a critical juncture in Britain's history. The figure of the coal miner became invested with sharply contrasting characteristics: hero and villain, underdog and enemy, proletarian traditionalist and standard bearer of Socialist advance. The miners were no mere spectators in this process. They were agents, thought to be uniquely powerful by their numerous opponents, and half believing in this power themselves. The miners' special nature, however, jarred with the aspiration to lead an ordinary life, producing tensions that were most cruelly exposed in the year-long strike of 1984/1985.

Fraser, Max, Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class. (Politics and Society in Modern America) 336 pp. 2023:9 (Princeton U. Pr., US) <703-1260>
ISBN 978-0-691-19111-9 hard ¥6,899.- (税込) US$ 32.00 *

The largely untold story of the great migration of white southerners to the industrial Midwest and its profound and enduring political and social consequencesOver the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The "hillbilly highway" was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. In Hillbilly Highway, Max Fraser recovers the long-overlooked story of this massive demographic event and reveals how it has profoundly influenced American history and culture-from the modern industrial labor movement and the postwar urban crisis to the rise of today's white working-class conservatives.The book draws on a diverse range of sources-from government reports, industry archives, and union records to novels, memoirs, oral histories, and country music-to narrate the distinctive class experience that unfolded across the Transappalachian migration during these critical decades. As the migration became a terrain of both social advancement and marginalization, it knit together white working-class communities across the Upper South and the Midwest-bringing into being a new cultural region that remains a contested battleground in American politics to the present.The compelling story of an important and neglected chapter in American history, Hillbilly Highway upends conventional wisdom about the enduring political and cultural consequences of the great migration of white southerners in the twentieth century.

Jewell, Joseph O., White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era. 224 pp. 2023:12 (U. North Carolina Pr., US) <703-1272>
ISBN 978-1-4696-7348-6 hard ¥21,344.- (税込) US$ 99.00 *
ISBN 978-1-4696-7349-3 paper ¥6,457.- (税込) US$ 29.95 *

In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time, demographers have predicted the "browning" of the nation's middle class-once considered a de facto "white" category-over the next twenty years as the country becomes increasingly racially diverse. In this book, Joseph O. Jewell takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century to show how evidence of middle-class mobility among Black, Mexican American, and Chinese men generated both new anxieties and varieties of backlash among white populations. Blending cultural history and historical sociology, Jewell chronicles the continually evolving narratives that linked whiteness with middle-class mobility and middle-class manhood. In doing so, Jewell addresses a key issue in the historical sociology of race: how racialized groups demarcate, defend, and alter social positions in overlapping hierarchies of race, class, and gender. New racist narratives about non-white men occupying middle-class occupations emerged in cities across the nation at the turn of the century. These stories helped to shore up white supremacy in the face of far-reaching changes to the nation's racialized economic order.