The pieces collected here offer a stimulating, empirically grounded survey of North American collective behaviour, popular mobilisations, and social struggles.
What emerges is Palmer's sustained reflection on long-standing interpretive historical problems of class formation, the dynamics of social change, and how popular social movements arise and relate to law, the state, and existing cultural contexts.
The main goal of the book is to explore how working classes form historically and how class struggle develops in real social contexts.
Influenced partly by historians like E. P. Thompson, Palmer treats class as something made through struggle and experience, not a fixed category.
Scholars often value the book because it shows how culture, politics, and economics interact in class formation.
