Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness, editors, The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2009. xxxix + 750 pp. $155 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-7656-1330-1.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Melvyn Dubofsky, Departments of History and Sociology, Binghamton University.Published by EH.NET (October 2009)
This is not your typical historical encyclopedia. Nor is it what one might expect to find in a reference work whose ostensible subject is strikes in American history. Unlike a similar volume edited by Ronald Filippelli and published nearly twenty years ago (1990), Labor Conflict in the United States: An Encyclopedia, which featured articles on more than 250 strikes listed alphabetically from A to Z, this new encyclopedia consists of mini-essays on a variety of subjects related to labor conflict. Instead of treating its subject matter alphabetically, it organizes its 65 short essays into five parts and three sub-sections with seven introductions written by the three editors. In addition to the editors, 59 scholars, largely academic historians, contributed to the encyclopedia, several writing more than one entry. The volume includes an elaborate apparatus that identifies all its contributors, provides a chart of the abbreviations used, features a full historical time-line, a topic finder, name and subject indexes, additional bibliography beyond the ample references found at the conclusion of each entry as well as a general introduction to the volume and a typology of strikes, both written by one of the editors, Aaron Brenner, holder of a doctorate in history from Columbia and currently employed by the Service Employees International Union. His coeditors are Immanuel Ness, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, CUNY, author and editor of several books on contemporary workers and labor relations, and Benjamin Day, the director of two Massachusetts health care lobbying groups and a doctoral student at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
As is the case with any volume built on the contributions of sixty-two individual authors, the quality and usefulness of the essays vary enormously. [...]