ROSEMARY FEURER is professor of history at Northern Illinois University. She is the author of Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950 (2006) and dozens of essays and engaged history projects. She is currently working on a monograph titled “The Illinois Mine Wars, 1860–1940.” She is also at work on a new biography of Mother Jones, the renowned labor activist of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

WILLIAM HORNE is the Barbieri Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at Villanova University. He writes about the relationship of race to labor, freedom, and capitalism during Reconstruction and Jim Crow. His book manuscript, “A Hate Hustle: Racial Capitalism and the Promise of an Egalitarian Revolution,” identifies the ways Black radicals organized to overturn the racial state expressed in systems of incarceration, labor, relief, and consumption from slavery through Jim Crow. He is cofounder and editor of The Activist History Review.

BRIAN KELLY is reader in US history at Queen’s University Belfast, formerly director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded After Slavery Project and cocreator of the online teaching resources on Reconstruction available through the online Lowcountry Digital History Initiative. He has published extensively on labor abolition, wartime slave self-activity and Black labor and political mobilization during Reconstruction.

MATTHEW E. STANLEY is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, where he specializes in race, regionalism, and labor during the Civil War era, as well as Civil War memory. He is the author or editor of three books, including the recent Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War (2021). His first book, The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America (2017), won the 2018 Wiley-Silver Prize for best first book in Civil War history.

REBECCA CAPOBIANCO TOY received her PhD from William and Mary. She specializes in Civil War memory, commemoration, and constructions of national identity. Becca currently works as an Interpretation and Engagement Coordinator for the Washington Office of the National Park Service.

CHAD E. PEARSON is assistant professor of history at the University of North Texas and is primarily interested in ruling class organizations and violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has written two books—Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (2022) and Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (2016)—and coedited, with Rosemary Feurer, Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (2017). He is currently writing a book called “The Hooded Bosses’ Organization: The Second Ku Klux Klan and the War on Labor” for Verso.

Book Reviews

Book Review Essay
Brian Kelly