History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out

Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History

James R. Barrett

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780822372851
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out James R. Barrett rethinks the boundaries of American social and labor history by investigating the ways in which working-class, radical, and immigrant people's personal lives intersected with their activism and religious, racial, ethnic, and class identities. Concerned with carving out space for individuals in the story of the working class, Barrett examines all aspects of individuals' subjective experiences, from their personalities, relationships, and emotions to their health and intellectual pursuits. Barrett's subjects include American communists, "blue-collar cosmopolitans"—such as well-read and well-traveled porters, sailors, and hoboes—and figures in early twentieth-century anarchist subculture. He also details the process of the Americanization of immigrant workers via popular culture and their development of class and racial identities, asking how immigrants learned to think of themselves as white. Throughout, Barrett enriches our understanding of working people's lives, making it harder to objectify them as nameless cogs operating within social and political movements. In so doing, he works to redefine conceptions of work, migration, and radical politics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments ·
• Introduction. The Subjective Side of Working-Class History
• Chapter One. The Blessed Virgin Made Me a Socialist Historian: An Experiment in Catholic Autobiography and the Historical Understanding of Race and Class
• Chapter Two. Was the Personal Political? Reading the Autobiography of American Communism
• Chapter Three. Revolution and Personal Crisis: William Z. Foster, Personal Narrative, and the Subjective in the History of American Communism
• Chapter Four. Blue-Collar Cosmopolitans: Toward a History of Working-Class Sophistication in Industrial America
• Chapter Five. The Bohemian Writer and the Radical Woodworker: A Study in Class Relations
• Chapter Six. Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930
• Chapter Seven. Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the “New Immigrant” Working Class
• Chapter Eight. Irish Americanization on Stage: How Irish Musicians, Playwrights, and Writers Created a New Urban American Culture, 1880–1940
• Chapter Nine. Making and Unmaking the Working Class: E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, and the “New Labor History” in the United States
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index