Introduction

How did climate crisis shape labor relations in Brazil during the final years of slavery? The prize-winning essay “Arid Roads to Coercion: Labor Policies Devised During a Drought in the Year of Brazilian Abolition, 1888–1889” by Felipe Azevedo e Souza examines this problem. In 2023 Labor launched a Translation Prize for the best unpublished essay in labor and working-class history in the Spanish or Portuguese languages. The contest aimed to introduce to our readers some of the best new work in labor history from Latin America. As part of the prize, Labor covered the costs of translation. A committee chaired by Brodwyn Fischer and including Paulo Fontes, Jeffrey Gould, and Ángela Vergara awarded the prize to Azevedo e Souza, finding that his article “sheds new light on the ways unfree labor persisted in the wake of bondage, adding to important literatures about vagrancy legislation and conditional abolition contracts.” The environmental crisis involved a global drought that had particularly severe consequences in Brazil. Complicating our understanding of labor relations that were neither “free” nor “enslaved,” Azevedo e Souza demonstrates how state actions blended incentives and coercion to shape the climate migration made necessary by the drought. Managing the problem, he argues, “involved control over the mobility of the migrants, forcible recruitment, strategies to discipline the labor force, and the instrumentalization of hunger and extreme penury to constrict free choice.” In the end, state manipulation of the labor market played a central role in the creation of “free labor” in Brazil.We remain in Latin America with our next article, “Labor Education as an Arena of Ideological Dispute in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ecuador” by Marc Becker. It intriguingly examines US government propaganda efforts in the 1950s—earlier than the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) strategies in the 1960s that have received so much attention. Becker demonstrates the significance of experiments during this earlier decade for shaping later US labor policies in Latin America. At the heart of this effort were labor training courses that not only served as a precedent for AIFLD but also emerged as a “prime arena for deliberations over what role trade unions should play in society and who should control their policies and actions.” Furthermore, Becker’s intensive research demonstrates that officials designed these courses not to empower workers, but to spread anticommunist and pro–United States propaganda.Meanwhile, historian Joseph Rathke analyzes an inspiring and successful fight for labor rights by downstate Illinois teachers (depicted on our cover) in a case study that holds lessons for contemporary activists. These unsung labor activists from towns like Danville, Rathke demonstrates, owed much to their parents and grandparents who had worked in factories and mines and there developed a radical and militant tradition. Illinois teachers also felt the influence of the New Left. The suburban and postindustrial cities, he shows, became “multifaceted, dynamic spaces of labor conflict.” Furthermore, the movement these teachers built stood in opposition to a declining liberal establishment. Instead, creative (and often illegal) strike tactics combined with worker solidarity, grassroots organizing, and savvy political alliances to pave a path to victory. This well-researched and dramatic storytelling suggests a new approach for understanding teacher unionism in the late twentieth century.Finally, Nelson Lichtenstein offers reflections on the intellectual career of Mike Davis, who passed away in 2022. Davis has long been known and admired for his prodigious and visionary work, but Lichtenstein’s careful scrutiny yields new insights. He gives particular attention to Davis’s early years in Britain, when he engaged with New Left Review. Davis came of age within the structuralist milieu around Perry Anderson, so while US historians were most influenced by the work of E. P. Thompson, Davis stressed not the possibilities for radical solidarity and working-class agency but, rather, the structural causes of racial and ethnic division. One can sense the thumbprint of structuralism in Davis’s work, deployed powerfully, for example, in City of Quartz. His output over the next decades further explored the constraints of capitalist exploitation even as it tackled new themes including ecological devastation, the threat of a global pandemic, and the spectacular impact of Latinos on US cities. Davis’s work presented a very different analysis of the perils and potentialities of global capitalism when compared to US labor history during the same decades. Ironically, by the second decade of the twentieth century, Lichtenstein intimates, things had come full circle: US labor historians had moved toward more appreciation of structural constraints, while Davis articulated renewed interest in forms of radical solidarity and resistance. There’s much food for thought in this essay regarding not only Davis’s work but also the broader patterns of labor and working-class history and historiography over the last half century.The book review section complements the essay on Davis by introducing us to books that delve into the structural constraints of global capitalism as well as possibilities for radical and humane solidarity. Traveling across the centuries and around the world, the reviews cover such topics as love and the working class in the nineteenth-century United States, gender and work in early modern Europe, slavery in the Colombian Black Pacific and in Jamaica, labor and resistance in late twentieth-century Spain and Portugal, and prostitution in late colonial Vietnam. Among the gems here are Simon Newman’s appraisal of Catherine Hall’s tour de force, Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism, and Alexandra Finley’s assessment of Ellen Malenas Ledoux’s Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century. Pull up a chair and take a tour with the eloquent writers in this section—and while you’re at it, linger over “Working with Dolly Parton,” the poem that begins this issue. Jan Beatty captures the complexity of a woman’s workday and emotional labors as she sings the lyrics of “Jolene.”