The work of Bryan D. Palmer, one of North America’s leading historians, has influenced the fields of labour history, social history, discourse analysis, communist history, and Canadian history, as well as the theoretical frameworks surrounding them. Palmer’s work reveals a life dedicated to dissent and the difficult task of imagining alternatives by understanding the past in all of its contradictions, victories, and failures.

Dissenting Traditions gathers Palmer’s contemporaries, students, and sometimes critics to examine and expand on the topics and themes that have defined Palmer’s career, from labour history to Marxism and communist politics. Paying attention to Palmer’s participation in key debates, contributors demonstrate that class analysis, labour history, building institutions, and engaging the public are vital for social change. In this moment of increasing precarity and growing class inequality, Palmer’s politically engaged scholarship offers a useful roadmap for scholars and activists alike and underlines the importance of working-class history.

With contributions by Alan Campbell, Alvin Finkel, Sam Gindin, Gregory S. Kealey, John McIlroy, Kirk Niegarth, Bryan D. Palmer, Leo Panitch, Chad Pearson, Sean Purdy, and Nicholas Rogers.

Acknowledgements

Introduction / Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, and Julia Smith

Part 1: Labour
1. Bryan D. Palmer, Labour Historian / Alvin Finkel2. Bryan D. Palmer, Social Historian / Ted McCoy3. Labour History’s Present: An Account of Labour/Le Travail Under Bryan D. Palmer / Kirk Niergarth

Part 2: Experience, Discourse, Class
4. Bryan D. Palmer and E. P. Thompson / Nicholas Rogers5. On Polemics and Provocations: Bryan D. Palmer vs. Liberal
Anti-Marxists / Chad Pearson6. Bryan Douglas Palmer, Edward Palmer Thompson,John le Carré (and Me): Workers, Spies, and Spying, Past and Present / Gregory S. Kealey

Part 3: Politics
7. Palmer’s Politics: Discovering the Past and the Future of Class Struggle / Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin8. The Hippopotamus and the Giraffe: Bolshevism, Stalinism, and American and British Communism in the 1920s / John McIlroy and Alan Campbell9. The June Days of 2013 in Brazil and the Persistence of Top-Down Histories / Sean Purdy10. Old Positions/New Directions: Strategies for Rebuilding Canadian Working-Class History / Sean Carleton and Julia Smith
Afterword: Rude Awakenings / Bryan D. Palmer

Selected Works of Bryan D. Palmer

List of Contributors