The New Labor History and the Historical Moment.

The writing of history almost invariably imposes two duties on the author to tell a story within the strictures of the clock and the calendar and to analyze its significance. A remarkable fact about Herbert G. Gutman's historical work both the labor history and the slave family book is that he shunned narrative. Since readers like stories, this automatically limited the size of his audience. There is one exception, the long essay entitled "Labor in the Land of Lincoln: Coal Miners on the Prairie," a richly detailed account of the mining community of Braidwood. In a large diverse nation with a federal system like the United States both local and national labor history are of great importance and the regions and the states can hardly be ignored. If the historian emphasizes one to the exclusion of others, his work will leave large gaps and become vulnerable to errors of judgment. Further, local history is probably the most difficult to write because workers with rare exceptions leave no written records. Thus, the sources are either thin or nonexistent.