Book Review

Starting from the multiethnic composition of the United States working class and the institutional Americanness of labor unions, Catherine Collomp poses the question of immigrant workers' integration into or exclusion from the nation, a dual nation internally divided hierarchically into white and black. Thus the author eschews the compartmentalization of United States historiography and integrates labor/working-class history, black history, political history, and intellectual history. She enlarges the perspective by implicit as well as explicit comparisons to Europe as a whole and to France in particular. Her scholarly discourse of reference is not only American, as it is in much United States historiography, but is as much French with some Italian additions. The study, which appeared four years before the Organization of American Historians' La Pietra Report on the internationalization of American history, thus situates itself squarely in a supranational perspective.

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