Books about individual labor disputes in North America are rarer than one might think, particularly when one moves beyond a narrow set of truly iconic conflicts like Homestead or the “Big Strike” in Colorado. Rarer still are books that effectively attempt to uncover the legacy of a strike, to trace its particular social and political implications. Stefan Epp-Koop’s We’re Going to Run this City: Winnipeg’s Political Left after the General Strike is just such a book.

The 1919 general strike in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is widely understood as a signal moment in Canadian history. Although unfamiliar to many American labor historians, the strike has been well studied by many Canadian historians and is the subject of at least five books and quite a number of scholarly articles. Epp-Koop’s contribution is to trace the history of labor relations and politics in Winnipeg over the two decades following the strike. In so doing...

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