My familiarity with Brazilian working-class history remains limited. To the degree that I have any at all, it comes through three decades of interactions with John French and some of his familiar associates in Brazilian and Latin American labor history, especially Paulo Fontes, Alexandre Fortes, and my colleagues Daniel James and Jeff Gould at Indiana University. Lula and His Politics of Cunning, as French would be the first to admit, is an expression of decades of collective endeavor with these scholars and many others (not for nothing do his acknowledgments run over six pages of fine print). For me, however, French's biographical approach to the social history of the modern Brazilian working class proved thrilling not only because of its accessibility to non-Brazilianists like myself but also for its powerful resonance with my recent research on the awakening of South African workers under an authoritarian dictatorship during the 1970s...
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