Contributors, ranging from Chancellor Gordon Brown to the Guardian newspaper's Polly Toybee, discuss the Labour Party's political philosophy and address key topics like globalization, constitutional reform, equality and the 'third way'.

Contributors, ranging from Chancellor Gordon Brown to the Guardian newspaper's Polly Toybee, discuss the Labour Party's political philosophy and address key topics like globalization, constitutional reform, equality and the 'third way'.

In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the authors show, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

Based on extensive original research and interviews with a wide variety of key players, this is a compelling assessment of the Labour Party in power. Beginning with a detailed account of the development of New Labour, including the ideological tensions within the party, Eric Shaw provides a sophisticated analysis of the Labour Government during an unprecedented period of power. Offering the most detailed examination yet published of the actual performance of the party in several key social and economic policy areas, Losing Labour’s Soul? will be of enormous interest to students of British politics, labour history and party politics.

This book charts the development and suggests a future for Blue Labour.

The Labour Party's centenary is an appropriate moment to evaluate its performance across the twentieth century, and to reflect on why a party which has so many achievements to its credit nonetheless spent so much of the period in opposition. Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo have assembled a team of acknowledged experts who cover a wide range of key issues, from economic policy to gender. The editors also provide a lucid, accessible introduction. Labour's First Century covers the most important areas of party policy and practice, always placing these in a broader context. Taken together, these essays challenge those who minimize the party's contribution, whilst they also explain why mistakes and weaknesses have occurred. Everyone interested in British political history - whether supporters or opponents of the Labour Party - will need to read Labour's First Century.