History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out

<div>In <i>History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out</i> 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.</div>