It is a truism that the personal is political: State power and other forms of publicly constituted power can penetrate interpersonal intimacy. Feminists and other scholars have criticized the notion that “private” and “public” spheres can be separated; they have asserted that the processes and experiences of the home and family are indissolubly linked with those of the state and the institutions of politics.

The Spanish transition to democracy after the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975 is heralded as the “very model” of successful transition from authoritarianism to democracy (Gunther 1992), the epitome of “transition through transaction” (Share 1986, 1987). Spain is proclaimed “the country to be studied” (Przeworski 1986: 61) for good cause. Despite a long history of political turmoil, a notoriously brutal civil war, and nearly 40 years of dictatorship, Spain transformed itself into a democracy “from the inside out” using a remarkably quiescent process of reform called, significantly, the “strategy of consensus” (Carr and Fusi 1979; Payne 1985).

By the close of the nineteenth century, Hawai‘i had become a newly annexed territory of the United States and was tightly controlled by a cohesive oligarchy of haole sugar capitalists. The “enormous concentration of wealth and power” held by the Big Five sugar factors of Honolulu up until statehood was unparalleled elsewhere in the United States (Cooper and Daws 1985: 3–4). In contrast, native Hawai‘ians and immigrants recruited from China, Portugal, Japan, and the Philippines—in successive and overlapping waves—endured the low wages and poor working and living conditions characteristic of other agricultural export regions.

In the grand scope of American labor history, the fight to abolish Sunday work has been left on the margins of most historical accounts of the more universal fight to shorten the workday. For good reason, some may argue. The Sunday-closing, or Sabbatarian, movement hardly seems comparable in either its scope, its effects, or its long-term significance to the eighthour movement or to an even better known Protestant reform movement: temperance. Nevertheless, the fight to abolish Sunday work represents a significant case study for exploring how cultural influences, particularly religious ones, shaped the late-nineteenth-century industrial landscape. The cultural significance of Sundays drew clergy, labor activists, and employers into a social struggle that was a simultaneous struggle over the meaning of Sundays and how best to put this meaning into industrial and legislative practice.

A fundamental characteristic of the southern United States before World War II was the separate, and lagging, economic path taken by that region relative to the rest of the nation. The South was particularly slow to advance in agricultural science and technology. Both contemporary investigators and recent scholarship have indicted southern institutions for delaying development in southern agriculture (Street 1957; Whatley 1985, 1987). Were sharecropping and tenancy, institutional arrangements that characterized the southern plantation system, responsible for retarding southern economic development? Despite the large amount of scholarly attention that has been focused on these issues, this question remains unanswered.