The latest issue of Labour History (Vol. 88. Not yet posted at History Cooperative) is a bumper one. At least for me.
Following on from their November 1996 issue comparing Australia and Canada, the latest issue looks at labour history in Australia and the United Kingdom. This is complemented by an article by Melanie Nolan summarizing comparative research in New Zealand labour history. She kindly has a paragraph about my own work on department stores in New Zealand and the United States. Always nice to be cited.
As if that wasn't quite enough to keep me reading, there's an article by Miles Fairburn and Stephen Haslett arguing that traditional explanations for why the New Zealand Labour party didn't win office until 1935 are wrong. The working class did not unite behind Labour, making the 1935 win a matter of picking up the small businesses and farmers; Labour had also to secure the skilled working class who were not supporters of it in the early twentieth century. As well as turning over the traditional argument Haslett and Fairburn develop a model for estimating correlations when one variable is measured at an individual level (occupation) and another at block level (voting behavior).
Today the latest issue of the Journal of Economic History arrived, bearing Jason Long's long awaited article on rural-urban migration and socioeconomic mobility in Victorian Britain. He finds (not a surprise) that mostly the people who could benefit from migration did, and others stayed home, though there were some inefficiencies in the labour market. Long makes use of the complete-count 1881 British census data, which you too can use if you have the need.
Posted by robe0419 at June 2, 2005 12:52 PM