Duke University Press History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class 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. Review “A stimulating collection of essays by one of the USA’s finest historians of the working-class experience.” Author: Gregory S. Kealey Source: Labour / Le Travail Review "These sparkling essays catch a mature and prodigious talent in an uncommonly contemplative mood. James R. Barrett ranges across the field's core themes of class, race, and ethnicity (including an original take on the whole Thompsonian paradigm), then uses his own personal intellectual and political coming of age as an opening to new inquiries about work and individual identity." Author: Leon Fink, author of Source: The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order From the Author James R. Barrett is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author and editor of several books, most recently, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City. David Roediger is Foundation Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas and the author of Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All. About the Author James R. Barrett is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author and editor of several books, most recently, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City. David Roediger is Foundation Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas and the author of Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All.