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.

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.

It’s like a plot from a Hollywood potboiler: start out in the mailroom, end up a mogul. But for many, it happens to be true. Some of the biggest names in entertainment—including David Geffen, Barry Diller, and Michael Ovitz— started their dazzling careers in the lowly mailroom. Based on more than two hundred interviews, David Rensin unfolds the never-before-told history of an American institution—in the voices of the people who lived it. Through nearly seven decades of glamour and humiliation, lousy pay and incredible perks, killer egos and a kill-or-be-killed ethos, you’ll go where the trainees go, learn what they must do to get ahead, and hear the best insider stories from the Hollywood everyone knows about but no one really knows. A vibrant tapestry of dreams, desire, and exploitation, The Mailroom is not only an engrossing read but a crash course, taught by the experts, on how to succeed in Hollywood.

Canada’s largest and most famous example of class conflict, the Winnipeg General Strike, redefined local, national, and international conversations around class, politics, region, ethnicity, and gender. The Strike’s centenary occasioned a re-examination of this critical moment in working-class history, when 300 social justice activists, organizers, scholars, trade unionists, artists, and labour rights advocates gathered in Winnipeg in 2019. Probing the meaning of the General Strike in new and innovative ways, For a Better World includes a selection of contributions from the conference as well as others’ explorations of the character of class confrontation in the aftermath of the First World War. Editors Naylor, Hinther, and Mochoruk depict key events of 1919, detailing the dynamic and complex historiography of the Strike and the larger Workers’ Revolt that reverberated around the world and shaped the century following the war. The chapters delve into intersections of race, class, and gender. Settler colonialism’s impact on the conflict is also examined. Placing the struggle in Winnipeg within a broader national and international context, several contributors explore parallel strikes in Edmonton, Crowsnest Pass, Montreal, Kansas City, and Seattle. For a Better World interrogates types of commemoration and remembrance, current legacies of the Strike, and its ongoing influence. Together, the essays in this collection demonstrate that the Winnipeg General Strike continues to mobilize—revealing our radical past and helping us to think imaginatively about collective action in the future.

The history of private lives of the first and second generations of Polish immigrants in the United States is viewed from the perspective of migrants themselves. What did the migrants do? How did they behave? How protagonists (men, women, children) with their own words presented their experience? Their experience is compared with one of the other groups. The book discusses migration processes, formation of neighborhoods, experiences at work, daily and family lives, functioning of parishes and tensions related to it, and construction of people’s identities and their constant reformulations. Migrants created mutual-aid societies, which played not only economic, but also ideological and political roles. Experiences of immigrants’ children at home and at school are presented, mostly in their own words and from their own perspective. Cultural activities reflect constant changes of groups’ self-identity. The book also depicts the relations between the Polish migrants and members of other ethnic groups – in the streets, public spaces, politics, and within the Catholic church. People lived in pluri-cultural, culturally diverse, contexts, and thus relations with “the others” were complex. The panorama ended in the year 1939, when after the Great Depression, the group entered into a new period of transformation during the war.

This volume gathers over 40 world-class scholars to explore the dynamics that have shaped the Irish experience in America from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. From the early 1600s to the present, over 10 million Irish people emigrated to various points around the globe. Of them, more than six million settled in what we now call the United States of America. Some were emigrants, some were exiles, and some were refugees—but they all brought with them habits, ideas, and beliefs from Ireland, which played a role in shaping their new home. Organized chronologically, the chapters in this volume offer a cogent blend of historical perspectives from the pens of some of the world’s leading scholars. Each section explores multiple themes including gender, race, identity, class, work, religion, and politics. This book also offers essays that examine the literary and/or artistic production of each era. These studies investigate not only how Irish America saw itself or, in turn, was seen, but also how the historical moment influenced cultural representation. It demonstrates the ways in which Irish Americans have connected with other groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, and sets “Irish America” in the context of the global Irish diaspora. This book will be of value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as instructors and scholars interested in American History, Immigration History, Irish Studies, and Ethnic Studies more broadly.

"Irish and Jews met each other in urban America and in the process transformed each other and the nation as a whole"--