Editor’s Introduction

The Roundtable with which this issue begins presents a serious stocktaking of the iconic, field-defining Working Class in American History (WCAH) series of the University of Illinois Press. Initially imagined as a modest series (see the original proposal document in Jeffrey Sklansky’s article) with the support of the then new press director Richard L. Wentworth (currently, Laurie Matheson), WCAH soon reaped a whirlwind of new scholarship. With some 140 volumes in print since it emerged in 1978 under the guidance of Herbert Gutman, David Brody, and David Montgomery, WCAH effectively positioned the social-history, bottom-up-centered “new labor history” as an important pillar of American historiography as a whole. Inevitably, the series has also regularly reflected not only the methodological swings but the mood swings of the surrounding scholarly community. Looking back on its forty years, three distinguished “outside” (i.e., outside the WCAH canon) scholars assess the series’ — and thus effectively...