Editorial.

Patmore, Greg

This issue opens with a thematic section on the historical analysis of social democratic parties and business. Some of these papers were initially presented to a symposium organised by the Business and Labour History Group at the University of Sydney in September 2009 and then presented by the authors to Labour History for refereeing. The thematic includes an introduction and seven articles. The section highlights the longstanding recognition of the need by labour historians to examine relationships between social democratic parties and business particularly when these parties are in power. The articles primarily focus on the experience since the early 1980s in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

There are also three other refereed papers in this issue. Robert Tierney looks at the 1917 railway strike and argues that senior management strategically pre-planned the strike. He focuses on two particular tactics: the first was the stockpiling of coal to prevent the possibility of the coalminers assisting the striking railway workers; the second was the familiar tactic of training groups of salaried officers or white collar workers performing the work in order to break the strike. Continuing the interest of the journal in Papua New Guinea, Noah Riseman questions whether World War II was a watershed period in the experience of Papuan labour. He suggests that pre-war attitudes continued in regard to racial status of indigenous workers. Phillip Deery explores McCarthyism in the United States during the 1950s by examining the treatment of Professor Lyman Bradley at New York University. Deery's article raises broader questions concerning the independence of university governance and the fragility of the ideal of academic freedom in modern times.

This issue contains a number of other important contributions. Sandy Jacoby in delivering the keynote address at the inaugural conference of the Association Academic Association of Historians in Australian and New Zealand Business Schools (AAHANZBS) at the University of Sydney in December 2009 examines the role of history in business schools. There is a report on the successful Red, Green and In-between Conference held at Brisbane in February 2010 which examined labour history and the environment. Selected papers from the conference will appear in the November issue of the journal. There are tributes to several notable Australian labour historians who recently passed away: Jim Hagan, Bruce Mitchell and Bill Robbins. We have a contribution to our Labour History in Song series by the late Alistair Hulett. The book review section continues to highlight the latest scholarship both in Australia and overseas.

The global financial crisis has impacted severely on number of publicly funded universities in the United States. One casualty of this was the History Co-operative at the University of Illinois Press which will cease operating on 30 June 2010. The History Co-operative played a crucial role in establishing an international electronic platform for the wider dissemination of Labour History and raising the status of the journal. I would like to thank particularly Paul Arroyo and Bill Regier from the History Co-operative for their assistance over the years. In light of the end of the History Cooperative as a publishing platform we will extend our publishing relationship with JSTOR to ensure that a continuous run of current and back issues is available. There are also moves to continue the History Co-operative in an alternative form as a forum for editors of history journals to discuss issues in common relating to publishing.