Most scholarship on nineteenth-century labor internationalism focuses on the efforts of labor and socialist leaders to create solidarities across national boundaries among an emerging new class of industrial workers, and the labor unions and political parties created to represent them, through organizations such as the First and Second Internationals. In this provocative and important book, however, Niall Whelehan emphasizes the significance of battles over land ownership, and the conditions under which tenant farmers and agricultural laborers worked, in contributing to the radical forms of internationalism that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, Whelehan focuses on a period of agrarian agitation that raged in Ireland from 1879 to 1882 (the Irish Land War), and on the spread of Irish Land League and Ladies' Land League chapters to diaspora communities across the globe. He argues that Land League activists, especially those from emigrant communities, often traveled to different countries and simultaneously participated in multiple radical movements. Through their activism, the Irish Land War became an "important point of reference" for many proponents of new forms of internationalism, encouraging a creative cross-fertilization of ideas about how to protect the rights and well-being of the producing classes in both industry and agriculture (16).Whelehan uses four cases studies of individual Land League activists to advance his thesis. His first case study is of London-based emigrant and trade unionist Peter O'Leary. Born in Ireland, O'Leary emigrated with his parents to Britain as a young child. His father was a migrant farm laborer, and O'Leary worked as a farm laborer himself before becoming a street mason. He participated in many radical British organizations but particularly devoted himself to serving as an envoy to Ireland for the National Agricultural Labourers' Union and to establishing an Irish branch of this organization. O'Leary also traveled to the United States and Canada during the 1870s to investigate opportunities for assisted emigration of indigent farm laborers. During his tours, O'Leary met Patrick Ford, editor of the Irish World, and began writing occasional articles for it. This New York–based paper helped to internationalize the Land League struggle, boasting particularly high circulation rates in the United States, Ireland, and Great Britain. During his travels, O'Leary also befriended American land reformer Henry George, who wrote an important pamphlet on the Irish land question and toured Ireland and Great Britain to promote his agenda. Although the executive of the Land League in Ireland favored peasant proprietorships as a satisfactory solution to Irish land disputes, Ford, George, and O'Leary were part of a radical wing of the Land League movement that believed land was a natural resource and that nationalization of the land was the only way to ensure its fruits were equally shared.A second case study explores the role of female organizers such as Marguerite Moore in establishing branches of the Ladies' Land League throughout Ireland and Great Britain. The first Ladies' Land League chapter was created in New York in 1880 to help raise funds for the relief of Irish poverty. An Irish equivalent was established in 1881. With the help of female organizers like Moore, the organization spread quickly throughout Ireland and Irish emigrant communities in the United States and Great Britain. Chapters in the United States and Great Britain continued to engage primarily in fundraising, but in Ireland the women's chapters played an important role in rent strikes and boycott activities, often proving more radical than the men's branches. Moore became especially well known for her fiery speeches and was arrested for her activities. Like many Ladies' Land League activists, Moore was disillusioned by the compromises made by male Land League leaders with British policymakers to end the land wars, and she subsequently migrated to the United States with her large family and became active in a variety of feminist activities as well as Henry George's Single Tax land movement. A fascinating follow-up chapter to the one on Moore explores the overwhelmingly working-class composition and leadership of Ladies' Land League chapters in Dundee, Scotland, where women dominated the workforce in the city's jute textile mills. Here Whelehan demonstrates that Ladies' Land League chapters were not always dominated by middle-class women, as has sometimes been assumed.A third case study explores the neglected Irish emigrant community in Argentina, the largest outside the English-speaking world. Some Irish migrants took advantage of Argentina's expanding land frontiers as Indigenous populations were dispossessed to became landlords themselves. Other poor Irish emigrants became tenants of the new Irish landlord class. Whelehan's account traces the life of activist John Creaghe, who corresponded frequently with Henry George, believed in collective ownership of the land, and launched a "Land League–style campaign" against the Argentine landlord class (12). He eventually became an anarchist. Whelehan's final case study highlights the career of Thomas Ainge Devyr, who was born in Donegal but emigrated first to Britain and then to the United States, where he wrote for the Irish World and corresponded with Karl Marx. During his long career, Devyr "linked the Irish land question, English Chartism, and American agrarian radicalism" (12).Taken collectively, these case studies make a convincing case that there was a radical side to Irish Land League campaigns and that Land League activists often participated in many overlapping radical movements. Whelehan also demonstrates that Land League activists used many kinds of forums to inject questions of land ownership and the conditions under which agricultural workers labored into larger debates over class and gender inequalities. How successful they were in influencing the opinions of others active in the new international movements, however, is less well developed. Although Whelehan supplies some anecdotal evidence about interactions and correspondence between Land League activists and leading radical internationalists such as Henry George and Karl Marx, one is left wondering how deeply land and agricultural issues penetrated the international organizations created during this period. By contrast, the legacies of the tactics popularized by Land League activists, especially the women, seem clearer: boycotts and rent strikes became critical to many different types of working-class activism in the twentieth century. In sum, this book, while not definitive, casts important light on the international and radical dimensions of Irish Land League agitation and suggests promising new pathways for working-class historians to explore.

Miami is a hard place for working people. Second in the nation in income inequality, the Miami metro area also has the ninth-highest poverty rate in the nation. Employment tends to be seasonal and labor markets volatile. The largest sector, tourism, employs thousands of low-wage workers who must endure difficult working conditions while wearing a smile for outsiders on whose largesse they depend. Meanwhile, the political and social climate are both hostile to organized labor. Thomas A. Castillo's study of early twentieth-century Miami demonstrates that the city's workers have long dealt with these conditions and that, for an equally long period of time, they have demanded a political economy that would provide them a "competency . . . the right to a pleasurable life, with access to recreation and decent living conditions" (5). That Miami has seldom if ever made room for this vision, he concludes, is the result of the power of capitalists, not the failure of workers to challenge them.Across seven chapters, Castillo explores the labor history of Miami prior to World War II. Skillfully using a mix of obscure and scant sources to reconstruct a picture of Miami's early twentieth-century workers, he describes the matrix of class and race in the rapidly growing city. Elites, a group he largely leaves undetailed, envisioned a tropical paradise that simultaneously exploited white and Black workers and rendered them invisible or at least made them appear docile to wealthy tourists through significant social controls.Castillo demonstrates workers were anything but invisible or docile and pushed back against capitalist visions for Miami's development with their own. He focuses on three major struggles: control of the chauffeuring business, employers' demand for the open shop in construction, and access to jobs for local workers (as opposed to transient workers) during the Great Depression. In these cases, he argues, working-class Miamians, white and Black, spoke in the language of a "class-harmony discourse" that, recognizing the deleterious effects of labor strife for everyone involved in tourism and real estate, eschewed open conflict against the bosses (5). This lack of confrontation was rooted neither in an acceptance of the capitalist order nor in a lack of class identity, Castillo argues; instead it was a strategy for gaining leverage to create a moral economy for workers. That this strategy led workers to punch other workers instead of their bosses—and especially white workers to punch Black workers (and in one case to dynamite the Oddfellows Hall in what was then Colored Town)—was, according to Castillo, not evidence that they rejected class politics or of simple white working-class racism but the result of having to struggle in an economy of scarcity maintained by the city's elites. Pushed hard in an economy already segmented by Jim Crow, workers had little room for organizing across the color line or utopian politics if they hoped to maintain a livelihood. "The social democratic project of unionism often operated in the context of scarcity and competition," Castillo explains, "placing workers with difficult decisions and, sometimes, unfair outcomes" (8).Castillo is no doubt on to something with the reminder that the capitalist structure of Miami's political economy kept workers from making the world as they pleased. His final two chapters, both set in the era of the Great Depression and focused on the work of activist Perrine Palmer and the Dade County Unemployed Citizens' League, suggest that the changed circumstances of the 1930s opened the door for a broader, more-inclusive politics that culminated in the elimination of Florida's poll tax. Widespread scarcity, as well as a changing local and national political environment, made room for different approaches. The context, Castillo shows, matters.Of course, there is a difference between contextualizing and exonerating. White chauffeurs who terrorized Black chauffeurs to maintain a stranglehold on the market, whites-only building trades unions that embraced antiradicalism and racism to fight off the open shop, and local workers who sided with elites in their use of the "Hobo Express" to expel unhoused job seekers, lived in circumstances that were not of their making; nevertheless, they made choices that other workers (particularly Black workers) did not make. It would be a massive condescension for historians to judge them too much. But it would also be historical malpractice to explain away their actions as products of their own time.

What constitutes a good divorce or, rather, a fair divorce? This question animates Suzanne Kahn's eye-opening book—and impelled the generation of "feminist divorce reformers" at the heart of her study. As divorce rates doubled in the United States between 1967 and 1979, a generation of women who had entered marriages with the assumption of lifetime economic dependence on a male breadwinner found themselves cast out into the cold. Measly alimony (if any at all) wasn't even the worst of it. After years of caring for children and homes, dismal job prospects awaited them, and their dedication to family counted for nothing in the division of marital assets. Credit cards—granted on their exes' credit—were cut up the moment they were no longer wives. Generous employer-sponsored health insurance was terminated the day divorce papers were signed. Lucky divorcées held on to the spouse's less generous portion of Social Security. Pensions were a different matter: divorcing men walked away with their pensions intact. Not surprisingly, the country had a lot of motivated, angry women on its hands. Kahn argues that the feminist movement offered them answers and an outlet to channel their discontent.In drawing out the campaigns divorce reformers embarked upon from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kahn simultaneously illuminates histories of marriage and of the welfare state. At stake was women's economic citizenship, which divorce activists sought to rewrite through two claims: First, marriage was an economic contract, in which wives were equal partners, and for which they deserved state entitlements independent of their husbands. Second, marriage was also a status, which made wives worthy citizens, deserving of social and state recognition. Divorce reformers' often quite explicit counterpart to this worthy wife was the less meritorious unmarried woman on need-based public assistance.Painful compromises accompanied some remarkable wins as deeply ingrained male-breadwinner ideology, welfare state retrenchment, and conservative political ascendance blocked divorce reformers' most ambitious visions. The result, Kahn asserts, was that wealthier women, with private resources to divvy up, gained access to a range of family property. Lower-income women, whose primary household assets lay in access to selective entitlements like Social Security, still depended on meager and unequal distribution of dependent benefits by the state.Kahn lays out the step-by-step process by which this outcome emerged. The book opens with the no-fault divorce revolution. No-fault divorces were far easier to obtain, but they eliminated the presumption that wives merited ongoing support from their former husbands and left divorcing women at the mercy of judges in property distributions and with limited-duration "need-based maintenance" (32). The women who mobilized in response were largely middle class and white. When political compromises inevitably became necessary, they frequently clashed with lower-income women and women of color, as their backgrounds shaped their priorities. A grassroots push from below brought feminist organizations like the National Organization for Women and the Women's Equity Action League on board. Divorce reformers sustained this grassroots feminist energy through the 1970s; by the 1980s, political leaders and experts took the place of on-the-ground activists, nurturing a feminist agenda long past the conventional end point assigned to second-wave feminism.The middle chapters of the book follow debate over ten national laws targeted to divorced women's economic status that Congress enacted between 1974 and 1986. Kahn highlights how "functional equality" rather than "strict formal equality" was divorce reformers' goal (63). Among their desiderata were equal access to consumer credit, recognition of their unpaid household labor in property divisions, rights to their former husbands' employer-provided health insurance, equitable division of both private and federal-provided pensions, and restructuring of Social Security to give divorcing women adequate benefits independent of their ex-partners.The 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) is illustrative. Divorcing women lost access to credit built up during marriages (it went to husbands), faced sex and marital-status discrimination in applying for new credit, and could not get child support and alimony counted as income. The ECOA rectified those barriers. Two years later, Congress added race, national origin, and receipt of public assistance as further protected categories. A major victory for feminists, the legislation broke "coverture's long hold on the credit industry" (94). However, the ECOA guaranteed only equal access to credit. Poorer women (like the welfare rights activists also fighting for credit reform in these years) still struggled to prove their creditworthiness. Efforts to reform Social Security are also revealing. Feminists envisioned multiple means for wives to get out from under the dependent-driven structure of Social Security benefits, but in the end they won only changes that broadened their entitlements as formerly married women. As Kahn effectively demonstrates, divorce reformers succeeded with laws "mandating that private institutions treat married women as equals and partners"; they failed in "instilling this understanding of married women into the public social insurance system" (95).Broad reluctance to abandon selective entitlements anchored in marriage combined with conservative political power to whittle away at feminists' ambitions. By the end of the 1980s, divorce reformers returned their attention to states and led campaigns to replace common law with community property regimes. They renewed pressure on judges to count women's unpaid contributions in property settlements. Slowly, divorce reform energies faded as feminists shifted attention to better benefits for working women. Kahn observes that in the 1990s children replaced the divorced "displaced homemaker" as the citizens deserving of welfare state entitlements.Divorce, American Style would have benefited from drawing more fully on recent scholarship on the women's movement that has shown that divorce reformers were not alone in making the arguments Kahn uncovered. ERA advocates, general feminist Social Security reformers, wages for housework campaigners, and legal feminists all shared common ground with feminist divorce activists. Together, they reinforce Kahn's important reframing of the 1960s–80s feminist movement and demonstrate that formal workplace equality was never activists' single, or even primary, concern. Kahn rightly concludes that feminists were not able to win the egalitarian vision they imagined. Her study reveals how path dependency and a tradition of awarding entitlements to the worthy meant that marriage remained entrenched in the US welfare structure to the detriment, mostly, of poorer and working-class Americans.

The study of Brazilian slavery and abolition has expanded considerably in the last few decades, with important conclusions that develop our understanding of citizenship and freedom. The Boundaries of Freedom is edited by historians Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg, who have written key works on postabolition citizenship, slavery, and the law. Here they provide in English scholarship from Brazilian historians who usually write in Portuguese. The “Brazilian School” of slavery, central to the study of Atlantic slavery, offers new discussions on geography, land use, identity, subjectivity, family relationships, and the diverse forms of enslavement and work that resulted from Brazil's gradual approach to abolition. The authors illustrate the social, cultural, and political dimensions surrounding gradual abolition and how the periodic reorganizing of slave structures resulted in new “boundaries of freedom” that property owners sought to control and enslaved and formerly enslaved persons to rewrite.In the United States, Rebecca Scott's 1988 edited volume The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil and her 2000 edited volume Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies critically marked the study of the postabolition period as an extension of the slave experience that questioned the meanings of freedom. The editors of The Boundaries of Freedom situate the book within this historiography, collecting articles that explore classic debates in Brazilian historiography, highlighting how freedom was in constant dialogue with shifting slave-based arrangements. The volume's introduction is a superb historiographical essay on slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, with direct theoretical connections to the articles. Gradual abolition in Brazil, starting with the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1831 and again in 1850, then the freeing of enslaved women's wombs in 1871, and the final abolition of slavery in 1888, resulted in varied experiences of freedom that coexisted with slavery throughout the nineteenth century. Freedom in modern Brazil is thus founded in slavery and cannot be analyzed without the legacy of slavery. The Boundaries of Freedom demonstrates those foundations, so crucial to the development of Brazil's current racism and inequality.The first section of articles focuses on practices that sustained and challenged the slave structures of the Brazilian Empire. Two works particularly show this tension by exploring the consequences of the 1831 law on illegal enslavement and child trafficking. The illegal re-enslavement of free people of African descent is an issue that both Beatriz Mamigonian and Grinberg hope to see further discussed. The authors start with how the criminal code of 1830 functioned to perpetuate the condition of slavery among the free and freed racialized poor. They compare prosecutors, judges, and members of superior courts to illustrate the judiciary's role in maintaining slavery. Marcus Carvalho's analysis of child trafficking provincializes the slave trade after 1831 and 1850, illustrating how the beaches of Pernambuco, under the control of local planters, were not only sites of contraband but also places where African-born children were forced into a status that was difficult for courts, dealing with cases of emancipation, to manage in later years.The second section of the book expands on the incomplete freedoms of abolition and postabolition, including discussions on gender and identity, urban geography, and migration and memory. Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado's fascinating analysis of the two (slave and free) identities a Black woman claimed to navigate the uneven road of gradual abolition delineates “the boundaries of freedom.” Her article can help undergraduate students see the consequences of gradual abolition in the real life of a person, and how a formerly enslaved woman told her own story. Fischer examines the lives of three people of African descent in Recife—a slave city that she connects to the Northeast's rural dynamics, informality, intimacy, and power rooted in dependency. Recife, here, is an urban geography of slavery and abolition—much less discussed than Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo during the cycle of coffee expansion—connected to a declining sugar economy. Robson Luis Machado Martins and Flávio Gomes highlight the diversity of Brazil's Black peasantry, which resulted from the mixing of varied groups. The main theme is the intense human mobility of the Southeast, as mobility and autonomy were fundamental to experiences of freedom.The third section on degrees of racial silence and Black intellectual life during the age of abolition may be of particular interest to scholars of racial identity. This part of the book is arguably the strongest, presenting the formation of modern racial identities and subjectivities according to Black intellectuals’ dialogue with the meaning of freedom and citizenship. All articles discuss important Afro-Brazilians in the country's abolitionist movements, from organizations in Recife, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo to well-known figures such as Teodoro Sampaio and André Rebouças. Historians Celso Thomas Castilho and Rafaella Valença de Andrade Galvão explore “breaking the silence” of an abolitionist newspaper whose founder chose to specify racial language during the era of the 1871 Free Womb Law, articulating a vision of racial solidarity. In another article, Ana Flavia Magalhães Pinto examines the Black networks (including the Guarda Negra) in republican Rio that defended the citizenship and free status of Afro-descendants; her look at associative life in Rio's postabolition organizations provides further evidence against Jose Murilo de Carvalho's infamous claim that Brazil's people were “bestialiazed” and therefore incapable of sound political action. Further, Wlamyra Albuquerque and Hebe Mattos's discussion of Sampaio and Rebouças, respectively, illustrates the struggles and disappointments of free lettered men during the dismantling of slavery. Sampaio upheld the tutelage of former slaves and indemnifying slave masters, but Albuquerque finds value in his racialized positioning to critically discuss a paradoxical time. Mattos resurrects Rebouças's transnational activism and proto-Pan-Africanism (which ended tragically), reminding historians of the hemispheric abolitionist moment and the incarnations of the enduring idea of Africa.The last part of the volume explores the postabolition period and the “afterlives of slavery.” The editors and authors of this volume, and generations of Brazilian historians, use this phrase to acknowledge the fundamental and lasting impact of African slavery on Brazilian society. Two North American historians, Daryle Williams and Sueann Caulfield, respectively examine such afterlives in art and the changing views of the notorious “Curse of Ham,” in Gilberto Freyre's popular conceptualization of the “Big House,” and the raising of illegitimate children. The last article by Martha Abreu may be of particular interest to US historians as a comparative study of two postabolition music composers, Eduardo das Neves and Bert Williams, and how slave songs endured (with hemispheric commonalities) seeking to transform past legacies and present situations.Although the book's readings may be advanced for undergraduate students, the articles on motherhood and family provide essential analysis of the effects of slavery on Brazilian life. The rest of the volume will certainly inform professors who teach and write about slavery in the Americas, particularly the nineteenth century, when slavery ended in most places of North and South America, due to war, but lasted as political negotiation and declined as resistance and accommodation in Brazil.

Politicians, pundits, journalists, and historians have much to discuss regarding the past and present of Ohio's working class and its politics. In Labor in Akron, 1825–1945, historian John A. Tully offers a “narrative history of the city's often tumultuous labor movement and an attempt to explain why its radical tendencies failed” (1). Tully's comprehensive accounting of Akron's labor history decenters the 1930s as the heyday of the city's worker activism and explores the landscape beyond the city's famous rubber industry. He identifies the turn of the last century as the peak of socialist labor activism in the city and traces over one hundred years of organizing and class politics across multiple sectors of the city's economy. In this deeply researched study, Tully seeks to answer some traditional questions about American labor history and class politics and presents Akron's labor history as a microcosm of America's—on a “a roller-coaster ride, with long periods of apparent quiescence punctuated by exhilarating outbreaks of popular mass struggle” (8). He also seeks to challenge the “historical amnesia” small-city Americans have, as exemplified in a lament to a visitor: “Nothing much ever happened here. . . . It's the most boring city in America” (8).In rich detail, Tully traces the city's labor history through seventeen chapters, arranged chronologically. He begins with the groups he describes as the city's first proletarians: the Irish canal diggers, the forgotten wage workers, and the artisans of the Western Reserve who made Akron an urban possibility rather than a rural outpost. Early chapters introduce a variety of industries in the Akron region, including pottery, coal mining, the production of matches and rolled oats, and glassworks and rubber manufacturing. He provides a picture of these industries and the groups of men, women, and children who worked in them, giving us a sense of their suffering and recounting their attempts to resist subjugation. Tully chronicles the efforts of Akron's growing working class to organize, strike, sit in, and find support and alliance with the socialist and communist parties, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).For Tully, the heyday of Akron's radical promise was in the growth of the Socialist Party among the city's majority working class in the years before World War I. Tully argues that the active local leadership of Marguerite Prevey, links to the local labor movement, and its appeal to some of the middle class was a shining moment of great potential for active class consciousness in Akron. He claims this moment was lost when, in 1913, a spontaneous strike among rubber workers failed because of the disarrayed leadership of the IWW, the scheming interference of company spies, allied vigilantes, and state intervention through the police force.Tully argues that Akron's radical tendencies failed because, “despite this rollercoaster of struggle, the development of a thoroughgoing class consciousness was blocked” (247). It was blocked by the bitter hunger caused by recession, the Red Scare, the dual power of corporate employers and the state, the deradicalized labor politics of the American Federation of Labor, and the racism of white southern workers in the era of the Great Migration. In the last four chapters of the book, Tully provides a thorough and textured account of the fiery and successful industrial organizing among rubber workers and the creation of the Akron Farmer-Labor Party in the 1930s. He examines the continued glowing embers of militance found in the progressive work of local union leaders and wildcat walkouts during World War II in the rubber plants despite leadership support for the no-strike pledge for wartime. While Tully lauds the militant social industrial unionism that was forged there, he focuses on the failure of radicalism in the “historic defeat of the labor party project,” which he posits as the result of the CIO unions’ turn to an “industrial-business unionism” (218). Ultimately, Tully measures the success of Akron's labor movement by its ability to build a lasting political party of its own (253).This book contributes to midwestern labor history, and Tully does a fine job of capturing the growth of Akron's industrial might beyond rubber, expanding Akron's historical footprint. But the author's focus on traditional and dated questions in the field, such as Werner Sombart's query “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” (1), results in a study less engaged in more recent historiographic conversations in the field.