Editor's Introduction

This issue features some remarkably innovative work about issues of race, ethnicity, and power within the North American workscape. The racialization, ethnic disparagement, and general “othering” of economic competitors or political opponents has become an almost standard trope in 19th and 20th century U.S. history narratives. It comes as no great surprise, then, that Minnesota mining interests, when faced with the militant resistance of Finnish mineworkers allied with the IWW in 1916, should attack the denizens of the remote Iron Range as “Jackpine Savages,” stand-ins for the Sioux of an earlier era—both now equally reviled as “barbarians” who posed “the greatest menace to civilization.” More surprising, surely, is Gerald Ronning's discovery of the intricate ways in which the Finns themselves adapted their identities to the rhythms of the North Woods, in short turning the epithets of primitivism into a cultural badge of honor. Two essays offer provocative new takes on central themes of African-American history. In the first Brian Kelly insists that the “accomodationist” project engaged by Booker T. Washington and others among the educated black elite (those whom W. E. B. DuBois would christen the Talented Tenth) was less about a renunciation of civil and political equality and more about complicity with New South industrialists' quest for cheap labor. A class-based rapprochement between “race leaders” and “white elites,” he argues, accounts for a contemporary discourse of race pride and uplift on the one hand and disgust and even revulsion for “the masses” on the other. Criticizing an historiography of celebration, where every act of elite-led uplift is interpreted as “an important sphere of agency,” Kelly calls for more emphasis on the voices of black working-class dissent.