Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1999
Abstract
The strength of Sellars's work is that it draws attention to the activities of the IWW at a local level during the least understood period of its history. This is particularly true of the book's focus on the A WOo A pioneer in the development of some of the IWW's most important strategies during this period, the A WO has received little previous attention. While Sellars illuminates the local, his work runs into trouble in its treatment of larger struggles within the IWW, the relative importance of the IWW's industrial unions, and the movement's culture. For example, although the book is replete with allusions to syndicalism-assertions of a labor based syndicalism on the part of the IWW in Oklahoma and agrarian syndicalism by tenant farmers- Sellars provides no analysis of syndicalism or its specific contributions to industrial unionism, nor does he treat the scholarship on syndicalism and the IWW.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 19:4 (Fall 1999). Copyright © 1999 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.