Gangs of New York

During the Popular Front of the mid 1930s, the longstanding political identities of French metalworkers were significantly transformed. For decades metalworker political identities had featured anti-patriotism and the rejection of cross-class alliances. But the tenor of the mass mobilizations and electoral behavior of metalworkers during the Popular Front reflected the emergence of a new political identity that combined class and national identities and support for cross-class political alliances. Through a study of metalworkers in the industrial city of Lyon this article argues that this new political identity emerged out of the intersection of industrial social relations and political opportunity structure.     

The New York factory investigating commission and the minimum wage movement

The study of working-class culture crosses disciplinary borders, reveals important insights, and builds productive intellectual networks in ways that contribute not only to scholarly conversations but also to public understanding of working-class people and communities. Yet despite several decades of academic discourse about the value of interdisciplinarity, working across disciplinary borders remains challenging. This article describes a text-centered approach that facilitates comparative and connective analysis of varied sources, a method the authors have used both in their own research and with students, who often find interdisciplinary work especially difficult. The article illustrates how a ‘text analysis rubric’ can provide a framework for analyzing a short video and a map, highlighting connections between very different types of sources and thus facilitate critical analysis that integrates labor history, labor geography, and representations of work, economic conditions, and place.