| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 159 words from this article are provided below; about 439 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. By Heather Ann Thompson. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. viii, 295 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8014-3520-X.)

The dramatic appearance of a revolutionary black nationalist workers' movement within Detroit's automobile plants in the late 1960s spurred a small academic cottage industry describing its trajectory and divining its meaning. Heather Ann Thompson's book is the latest in this vein, and unfortunately it echoes much of the unreflective analysis written earlier in the heat of the moment. Amid important descriptions of conditions that led some black auto workers to organize against both the company and their union, Thompson weaves an analysis that stresses liberalism's cooptation of radical dissent and that critiques the established union movement for exchanging 'community-based activism for more hierarchical modes' of organizing, thus tempering 'worker militancy.' The fundamental problem with this book is that those and other assertions are rarely explored in any sustained historical fashion. . . .

There are about 439 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.