The two review essays in this issue look at the founding years of labor history when ILWCH first took shape. Neville Kirk examines the first fifty years since the founding of labor history. He argues that by incorporating gender, race, transborder events, and bodies into their histories, labor historians have been on the cutting edge of historiographical trends. This is true of the present as well. Kirk points out that as protestors occupy financial districts and public squares around the world, global labor history is experiencing resurgence.

Lawrence Black reviews a recent run of histories of the 1970s, when ILWCH was founded, in Great Britain and the United States. The 1970s have a dismal reputation, Black notes, as a decade of hopelessness, crises, and conservative retrenchment. Black finds, however, that this particular decade—which included the rise of liberation movements for women, racial and ethnic minorities, environmentalism, and antinuclear activism—defies singular characterizations. The very fragmentation of political, cultural, and social trends of the 1970s, he argues, might be, in fact, a good lens to study the period. As ideas, cultural forms, and communities broke apart entrenched ideas and attitudes carried over from the interwar period, the fractured images of the 1970s might help historians disrupt monolithic declensionist narratives of this time in historical memory.