Recent History of the Labor Movement in the United States 1939--1965

The second of two volumes, and not a pamphlet: more than two hundred thousand words, sixteen chapters, a bibliography of several hundred titles, and both subject and name indexes. It carries the American labour movement from late 1939 to 1965 - the war years and the War Labor Board, the post-war strike wave, Taft-Hartley, the purges of the left-led unions, the AFL-CIO merger, and the movement's entanglement with the Cold War.

Unusually, the preface tells you exactly who wrote what. B. Y. Mikhailov was editor-in-chief, with N. V. Mostovets and G. N. Sevostyanov, and Mikhailov took the preface, chapters one to four, six, sixteen and the conclusion; I. I. Zhmykhova, V. A. Korolkov, A. P. Medvedev, P. A. Shishkin and A. N. Shlepakov took the rest, named chapter by chapter. The preface also corrects the attribution of the first volume, whose chapters the English edition had reorganised.

These were academic historians of the Academy of Sciences establishment, and they worked in the National Archives of the United States, in the archives and libraries of the major American unions, and at the Catholic University in Washington, Cornell, Wisconsin and California. The bibliography bears it out, citing the records of the National War Labor Board down to the individual folder.

Its advantage over much American writing of the same date is that it assumed class conflict was the organising fact of American life and went looking for the evidence.

Read it as a text of about 1970: the American literature closes around 1968-70 and the last living presence in it is George Meany.

Volume Two of two. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.