ILWCH: Forty Years On

Abstract

This issue celebrates the fortieth anniversary ofInternational Labor and Working-Class History. A relative youngster, it was a product of the second of two waves that resulted in the foundation of many labor history journals and societies.1The first wave, between roughly 1956 and 1962 included the Dutch-basedInternational Review of Social History;2the Feltrinelli Institute'sAnnaliin Italy; Le mouvement socialin France;Labor Historyin the United States; the BritishBulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History;3the West GermanArchiv fur Sozialgeschichte;and Australia'sLabour History. These journals developed at a time when organized labor and left-wing politics were strong and confident of their future,4although many who were active in these journals were highly critical of the political strategies of the existing Left and, in Eric Hobsbawm's words, viewed them “as an attempt to find a way forward in Left politics through historical reflection.”5The second wave of journal creation in labor history took place in the 1970s and included not onlyILWCH(1972), butRadical History Review(1975),Labour/Le Travail(1976), andHistory Workshop Journal(1976). These journals were especially shaped by the radicalism of the 1960s—the Vietnam War, the Cuban revolution, and the wave of student, feminist, and left-wing unrest in Europe and the world in 1968 and subsequently.6The new journals were more transnational and more comparative; malleable youths, these journals were more susceptible to the influence of the social movements evolving around them. They were more attentive to the relationship between metropole and colonial territories and more focused on the burgeoning fields of black studies and women's history than was true earlier. Drawing upon the work of sociologists, political scientists, and demographers, they were also animated by the tremendous explosion of social history in the 1960s and 1970s and new research underway on social protest movements, race, and social conditions.7