The Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, in co-operation with the Business and Labour History Group at the University of Sydney, will be holding its biennial national conference at the University of Sydney on 30 June, 1 July and 2 July 2005. The conference will proceed the 20th International Congress for the Historical Sciences in Sydney.

The general theme is `The Past is Before Us' and international contributions will be welcome. It is a great opportunity to meetAustralian colleagues and find out the latest trends in Australian labour history.

Labor History, the pre-eminent journal of labor studies for the past forty-four years, seeks high quality article submissions in all areas of historical labor studies. The journal is committed to recruiting and showcasing the work of labor historians, industrial relations scholars, economic historians, political scientists, historical sociologists, labor economists, business historians and all others who write about labor in historical perspective. Labor History also seeks scholarship that provides the journal with geographical and chronological breadth.

The University of California Press is pleased to announce the publication of:

Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement
by Rick Fantasia, Professor of Sociology, Smith College
go.ucpress.edu/hardwork

United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism
by Ileen A. DeVault

In the late nineteenth century, most jobs were strictly segregated by sex. And yet, despite their separation at work, male and female employees regularly banded together when they or their unions considered striking. In her groundbreaking book, Ileen A. DeVault explores how gender helped to shape the outcome of job actions-and how gender bias became central to unionism in America.

New site on the IISH server: Life Courses in Context, a collaboratory based on Dutch population registers and censuses (19th and 20th century).

The programme's objective is to develop a database with about 40.000 individual life courses of people born in the period of 1863-1922. This database with micro-data will be supplemented with core data on the level of the municipalities. This will be done by digitalizing the results of the ten-yearly censuses as they were taken between 1859 and 1947.

Strikes in an International Perspective

Heiner Dribbusch, Dave Lyddon, Sjaak van der Velden, Wessel Visser

The Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War

James M. Anderson. The Spanish Civil War: A History and Reference Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003. xxviii + 221 pp. Photographs, chronology, biographies of major participants, primary documents, glossary, political organizations leaders, annotated bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-313-32274-0.

Reviewed by Wayne Bowen, Ouachita Baptist University.
Published by H-War (May, 2004)

The Fondazione Turati (Florence) recently published four new titles:

Thomas Sokoll, ed. Essex Pauper Letters, 1731-1837. Records of Social and Economic History, New Series, vol. 30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xix + 727 pp. Notes, indexes. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-726242-2.

Reviewed by Steve King, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford.
Published by H-Albion (April, 2004)

Fink Shrink

Stephen H. Norwood. Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii + 328 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2705-3; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5373-9.

Reviewed for H-Business by Paul Moreno, Department of History, HillsdaleCollege
Published by H-Business (May 2004)