Patricia A. Cooper charts the course of competition, conflict, and camaraderie among American cigar makers during the two decades that preceded mechanization of their work. In the process, she reconstructs the work culture, traditions, and daily lives of the male cigar makers who were members of the Cigar Makers' International Union of America (CMIU) and of the nonunion women who made cigars under a division of labor called the "team system." But Cooper not only examines the work lives of these men and women, she also analyzes their relationship to each other and to their employers during these critical years of the industry's transition from hand craft to mass production."

Patricia A. Cooper charts the course of competition, conflict, and camaraderie among American cigar makers during the two decades that preceded mechanization of their work. In the process, she reconstructs the work culture, traditions, and daily lives of the male cigar makers who were members of the Cigar Makers' International Union of America (CMIU) and of the nonunion women who made cigars under a division of labor called the "team system." But Cooper not only examines the work lives of these men and women, she also analyzes their relationship to each other and to their employers during these critical years of the industry's transition from hand craft to mass production.

McGaw; Joy Parr, Simon Fraser University.

In the late Victorian era, smoking was a male habit and tobacco was consumed mostly in pipes and cigars. By the mid-twentieth century, advertising and movies had not only made it acceptable for women to smoke but smoking had become a potent symbol of their emancipation. From mass cigarette production in 1888 to the first studies linking cigarettes to lung cancer in 1950, The Freedom to Smoke explores gender and other key issues related to smoking in Montreal, including the arrival of "big tobacco," first attempts to ban the cigarette, wartime tobacco funds, French Canadian smoking habits, rituals of manliness, and the growing respectability of women smokers - none of which have been examined by historians. Jarrett Rudy argues that while people smoked for highly personal reasons, their smoking rituals were embedded in social relations and shaped by dominant norms of taste and etiquette. The Freedom to Smoke examines the role of the tobacco industry, health experts, churches, farmers, newspapers, the military, the state, and smokers themselves. A pioneering city-based study, it weaves Western understandings of respectable smoking through Montreal's diverse social and cultural fabric. Rudy argues that etiquette gave smoking a political role, reflecting and serving to legitimize beliefs about inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy that were at the core of a transforming liberal order.

With the introduction of new production methods and technological innovation, tradesmen and workers encountered new challenges. This study examines the development of trade unions as a manifestation of working class experience in late Gilded Age America. It underscores both the distinctive and the common features of trade unionism across four occupations: building tradesmen, cigar makers, garment workers, and printers. While reactions differed, the unions representing these workers displayed a convergence in their strategic orientation, programmatic emphasis and organizational modus operandi. As such, they were not disparate organizations, concerned only with sectional interests, but participants in an organizational-network in which cooperation and solidarity became benchmarks for the labor movement. Printers coped with the mechanization of typesetting by promoting greater cooperation among the different craft unions within the industry, with the aim of establishing effective job control. Building tradesmen exerted a pragmatic militancy, which combined strikes with overtures to the employers' business sense, to uphold the standards of craft labor. Cigar makers, especially handicraftsmen who found their position threatened by machinery and the growth of factory production, debated the merits of a craft-based union against the possible advantages of an industrial-oriented organization. Garment workers, caught in the snare of a sweating system of labor in which wages and work loads were inversely related, organized unions to mount strikes during the busy season in the hope of securing higher wages, only to see them whither in the midst of slack periods.

A survey of the topics in gender and history of Puerto Rican women. Organized chronologically and covering the 19th and 20th centuries, it deal with issues of slavery, emancipation, wage work, women and politics, women's suffrage, industrialization, migration and Puerto Rican women in New York.