GIVE US THAT OLD TIME LABOR HISTORY: PHILIP S. FONER AND THE AMERICAN WORKER.

The article narrates Philip S. Foner's historical research of American workers. When Foner conceived and began his series in the era of World War II he took recourse to the way explored a generation earlier by John R. Commons. He also initially wrote at a time when labor militancy was fresh in the minds of many people and organized labor seemed to be a power in the land--a time when Summer Slichter predicted a "laboristic" society. The appearance of Foner's sixth volume provides an opportunity to assess how well he has managed to adapt and evolve his original framework as the field he would survey, continually changed under his own gaze. Foner's enterprise is an individual effort, formally the creation of a person who alone had to master a huge mass of sources and secondary material. Yet anyone who examines the text and endnotes in Foner's six volumes and has read the published and unpublished literature written on the subject since the 1940s realizes that this history is every bit as much a collective enterprise in reality if not always in acknowledgments.