Full Description
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.
Contents
Foreword / David R. Roediger ix Acknowledgments xvii Introduction. The Subjective Side of Working-Class History 1 1. The Blessed Virgin Made Me a Socialist Historian: An Experiment in Catholic Autobiography and the Historical Understanding of Race and Class 7 2. Was the Personal Political? Reading the Autobiography of American Communism 33 3. Revolution and Personal Crisis: William Z. Foster, Personal Narrative, and the Subjective in the History of American Communism 58 4. Blue-Collar Cosmopolitans: Toward a History of Working-Class Sophistication in Industrial America 77 5. The Bohemian Writer and the Radical Woodworker: A Study in Class Relations 102 6. Americanization from the Botton Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880-1930 122 7. Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the "New Immigrant" Working Class / James R. Barrett and David R. Roediger 145 8. Irish Americanization on Stage: How Irish Musicians, Playwrights, and Writers Created a New Urban American Culture, 1880-1940 175 9. 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 192 Notes 209 Selected Bibliography 273 Index
