Welsh Journals

zones of Wales' require an historical analysis not yet supplied by 'the recent political historiography of Wales'. Greg Kealey, also aggregating and disaggregating strike statistics like an intellectual roulette player, finds a different pattern to the 'Parameters of Class Conflict in Canada' since he re-affirms a burst of unrest either side of the war that is in line with international upheaval rather than the lengthy 'endemic unrest' Deian Hopkin finds in Wales from the 1890s. Here comparison does pay off, in part because of the methodology employed by these numerate historians which ensures that we, and they, are driven back to non-measureable evidence for explanation of the perception and reaction of contemporaries to social dislocation that did not readily fit into their world set. The statistician stubs a toe against the French Commune or the General Strike every time. Those were events that involved the structure of feeling in societies. That is why the 1898 stoppage in South Wales (six months and coalfield wide) may look a bigger thing on a graph than the 1910 mid-Rhondda riots (intensely local and sectional) though in any sensitive rendition of these events the opposite is true: there was not one riot in Tonypandy but several, and on into 1911, which gathered in the social structure of a town in a way that gave significant political and cultural meaning to the industrial dispute just as the involvement of non-railwaymen in the Llanelli riots in 1911 is the clue, not a red herring to obscure an industrial strike statistic, and the anti-Jewishness at Tredegar at the same time cannot be divorced from the attached resentment against rent, conspicuous consumption and shopkeepers which runs like a thread through these years and places. We may safely conclude with Professor Montgomery that the international and scholarly collaboration of this volume 'helps historians discover regional and global patterns within working class activity' and that it is indeed 'best studied at the community level'. DAI SMITH Cardiff THE CALL OF ZION: THE STORY OF THE FIRST WELSH MORMON EMIGRATION. By Ronald D. Dennis. Religious Study Center, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, 1987. Pp. x, 243.$10.95. This handsomely produced book is typical of the thoroughness with which we associate the Mormons. It describes in great detail the endeavours of the first group of Welsh Mormons to reach their 'Zion' in the New World. This group, which totalled 326 men, women and children, crossed the Atlantic in 1849 on the Buena Vista and the Hartley. On reaching New Orleans they discovered that cholera was widespread and many succumbed to the disease. They then voyaged up the Mississippi/Missouri by steamer to Council Bluffs, by which time sixty-seven of their number had died and nineteen had defected. Though some stayed on at