James R Barrett
Biographic Data
| ID | 1451073 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James R Barrett |
| GIVEN NAMES | James R |
| FAMILY NAME | Barrett |
| SIGNATURE | BARRETT J R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6523-5861 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1941 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
America at 250: Illinois Labor
WHILE THE TITLE HAS OFTEN BEEN CONTESTED, Illinois has always been a labor state. In this sense, it reflects many aspects in the history of industrial America. It has been “Hog Butcher for the World, . . . Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler.” That is to say, it became the industrial giant's transportation hub and home to a remarkably diverse range of industries—and an equally remarkable range of immigrant workers who made all …
The Many Worlds of American Communism
The Gap Year—Intentional Use of Early Assurance Improves Performance in Medical School Curriculum
Purpose: According to the Association of American Medical Colleges National 2021 Matriculating Student Questionnaire, nearly 66.3% of first-year medical (M1) students take at least 1 gap year.1 Data from Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) showed an increase in gap year participation from 32% in 2019 to 67% in 2022; when considering traditional admission students, this number rises to 81%. Recognizing this trend, while aiming to improve di…
An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else
IT IS DIFFICULT TO AVOID THE CONCLUSION that of Chicago's broad range of ethnic groups, the Irish played a central role in shaping the city. They generated and held tenaciously to political power for generations, and for much of that time, they led the city's most important institutions—the police and fire departments, most of the city's unions, and the Catholic Church. Irish Catholic lay teachers and nuns taught and socialized many of the city's…
Dissenting Traditions: Essays on Bryan D. Palmer, Marxism, and History . Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, and Julia Smith
The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist
This is a very good biography of a very unusual woman. Grace Holmes Carlson was born of German and Irish working-class Catholic parents in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was formed by the Irish nuns who taught her in elementary school, high school, and college, by her experiences in graduate school at the University of Minnesota during the Depression, and by her study of Marxism and her life in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) between the l…
Pursuing the Individual in Working-Class History
The individual is still rare in working-class history, and, when we find them, they are often, like Bebel and Lula, exceptional. We are interested in them as leaders of vital mass movements and because they had an important impact on their societies. But another part of the promise of biographies like these is the opportunity to approach the personal dimensions of working-class experience through an individual life. Bringing the two biographies t…
Vernon L. Pederson. The Communist Party on the American Waterfront: Revolution, Reform, and the Quest for Power
This study of the Communist Party’s organizing among sailors and longshoremen focuses on the period from the mid-twenties through the mid-thirties, carrying the story from the Trade Union Unity League’s Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) to the foundation of the CIO’s International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) and National Maritime Union (NMU). The Communist Party on the American Waterfront is well-grounded in the Russian archival material—…
Lula and His Politics of Cunning
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the focus of a roundtable review on John D. French's Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil. The reviewers offer a reading of Lula and his legacies from perspectives that range from LGBTQ+ studies to racial politics, including an analysis centered on the story of a humble man that rose from below, "a most exceptional common man," from his humble beginnings up to his election as presi…
Red, Black, and White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950
Mary Stanton's history of the Communist Party in Alabama is a modest contribution to the large literature on the party in the United States, racial violence, and movements for equality in the South. Inspired by Flannery O'Connor, that consummate southern storyteller, Stanton offers a highly readable narrative of the Black and white radicals who faced enormous danger and violence trying to create an integrated, more equitable society in the South.…
Prizes in Working-Class History and the State of the Field
Each year since 2008, the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) has sponsored the Herbert Gutman Dissertation Prize in cooperation with the University of Illinois Press. Named to honor one of the founders of what came to be called the “New Labor History,” the prize recognizes an outstanding dissertation in the field and includes a cash award, recognition at LAWCHA’s annual meeting, and a contract to publish the work in the Universi…
History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History
Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remaking the Workers’ City by Craig Heron
Craig Heron’s monumental book on working-class life in early twentieth-century Hamilton, Ontario, appears at first glance to be an old-fashioned social history—a community study. It is, in fact, a wonderful analysis of class and its pervasiveness in the lives of real people. It has broad implications for our understanding of the relationship between these lives and the exercise of power in Canada and elsewhere during the industrial era. In a peri…
Forging a Laboring Race: The African American worker in the progressive imagination
Forging a Laboring Race: the African American worker in the progressive imagination." Social History, 42(4), pp. 575–576
Crossing Parish Boundaries: Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago, 1914-1954
Timothy B. Neary's excellent study of the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) represents an important counterpart to works that emphasize the role of working-class Catholics in segregation and racial violence. Neary acknowledges the discrimination and segregation in Catholic parochial life, but with his focus on the CYO, he takes a more optimistic view, at least for the period through the late 1940s. Neary explains why black converts poured into th…
Steel Barrio: The Great Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940
Book Review| May 01 2016 Steel Barrio: The Great Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940 Steel Barrio: The Great Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940. Innis-Jiménez, Michael. New York: New York University Press, 2013xi + 248 pp., $79.00 (cloth); $27.00 (paper) James R. Barrett James R. Barrett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2016) 13 (2): 95–96. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-3460906 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Sh…
Victor Greene, the Polish Immigrant Miner, and the Origins of the New Labor History
Research Article| October 01 2016 Victor Greene, the Polish Immigrant Miner, and the Origins of the New Labor History James R. Barrett James R. Barrett James R. Barrett is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His areas of specialization include the 20th century United States, along with social and labor history, race tradition, and ethnicity in the U.S. Barrett…
Making and Unmaking the Working Class: E. P. Thompson and the “New Labor History†in the United States
For both political and historiographical reasons, E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class had a great impact on the new radical US history at its moment of gestation. Thompson's Socialist Humanism appealed to younger radical historians seeking to break with both Cold War liberalism and a highly structuralist form of Marxism. His looser conception of class and his emphasis on culture shaped a new more flexible conception of class …
The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left
Book Review| March 01 2014 The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. Storrs, Landon R. Y.. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012 404 pp., $39.50 (cloth) James R. Barrett James R. Barrett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2014) 11 (1): 145–147. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2385507 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permis…
CRAIG Calhoun. The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements
This collection of Craig Calhoun's essays brings us back to essentials: what do we mean by the terms “class” and “radicalism,” and how do these concepts help us to understand the social movements and conflicts of early industrial society? Two overarching arguments emerge. First, we must distinguish between community-based forms of radicalism based on direct, personal relationships and local issues and later, broad class solidarities based on “lar…
America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867–1960
Rethinking the Popular Front
The history of the Communist International's Popular Front line (1935–9, 1941–5) represents a battleground between "traditional" scholars who see the line simply as a passing tactic and "revisionists" who see it as ushering in a new sort of radical social movement that provided a base for diverse radicals and helped to transform American society and culture. This new movement was sparked by and reflected the changing composition of the Communist …
Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend ‐ by Scott Reynolds Nelson
Was the Personal Political? Reading the Autobiography of American Communism
Taking the communist memoir as a sub-genre of working-class autobiography, the article analyzes, first, the characteristics of the communist autobiography, the conditions under which such works were produced, and their intended functions. Second, the article considers some personal dimensions of American communist history and how this more subjective side of the history relates to the more familiar political narrative of the movement. Recent femi…
Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America
Book Review| March 01 2007 Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America James Green New York: Pantheon, 2006 368 pp., illustrated, $26.95 (cloth) James R. Barrett James R. Barrett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2007) 4 (1): …
Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880-1930
Journal Article Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930 Get access James R. Barrett James R. Barrett professor of history University of Illinois at Urbana Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 79, Issue 3, December 1992, Pages 996–1020, https://doi.org/10.2307/2080796 Published: 01 December 1992
The Irish and the "Americanization" of the "New Immigrants" in the Streets and in the Churches of the Urban United States, 1900-1930
Research Article| July 01 2005 The Irish and the "Americanization" of the "New Immigrants" in the Streets and in the Churches of the Urban United States, 1900-1930 James R. Barrett; James R. Barrett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google David R. Roediger David R. Roediger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2005) 24 (4): 3–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/27501633 Cite Ico…
Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century
Journal Article Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. By Hasia R. Diner. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. xvi + 192 pp. Illustrations, notes, note on the sources, and index. Cloth, $20.00; paper, $9.95.) Get access James R. Barrett James R. Barrett University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, V…
Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939
Was the Personal Political? Reading the Autobiography of American Communism
Taking the communist memoir as a sub-genre of working-class autobiography, the article analyzes, first, the characteristics of the communist autobiography, the conditions under which such works were produced, and their intended functions. Second, the article considers some personal dimensions of American communist history and how this more subjective side of the history relates to the more familiar political narrative of the movement. Recent femi…
Whiteness Studies: Anything Here for Historians of the Working Class
This response takes up four of Eric Arnesen's many objections to whiteness research: (1) the fuzziness of the definitions for “whiteness”; (2) the notion of a process by which European immigrants “became white”; (3) the sloppy research methods; and (4) the political posturing of some authors. Although I consider a range of works, I concentrate mainly on those of David Roediger. A serious analysis of the roots of white working-class racism was lon…
Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945
Making and Unmaking the Working Class: E. P. Thompson and the “New Labor History†in the United States
For both political and historiographical reasons, E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class had a great impact on the new radical US history at its moment of gestation. Thompson's Socialist Humanism appealed to younger radical historians seeking to break with both Cold War liberalism and a highly structuralist form of Marxism. His looser conception of class and his emphasis on culture shaped a new more flexible conception of class …
The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left
Book Review| March 01 2014 The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. Storrs, Landon R. Y.. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012 404 pp., $39.50 (cloth) James R. Barrett James R. Barrett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2014) 11 (1): 145–147. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2385507 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permis…
Rethinking the Popular Front
The history of the Communist International's Popular Front line (1935–9, 1941–5) represents a battleground between "traditional" scholars who see the line simply as a passing tactic and "revisionists" who see it as ushering in a new sort of radical social movement that provided a base for diverse radicals and helped to transform American society and culture. This new movement was sparked by and reflected the changing composition of the Communist …
Forging a Laboring Race: The African American worker in the progressive imagination
Forging a Laboring Race: the African American worker in the progressive imagination." Social History, 42(4), pp. 575–576
Revolution and Personal Crisis: William Z. Foster, Personal Narrative, and the Subjective in the History of American Communism
William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism
William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism is an informative account of a bold labor organizer whose movement activity, most notably as leader of the explosive 1919 steel strike, terminated in pitiful Stalinist dotage and death in a Moscow sanitarium in 1961. This is James R. Barrett's second contribution to the University of Illinois Press series The Working Class in American History, following upon his 1987 social history of Chica…
William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism
Stalin over Wisconsin: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900-1950
Journal Article “Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950. By Stephen Meyer. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. xiv + 265 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8135-1798-2.) Get access James R. Barrett James R. Barrett University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 2, September 1993, Pages 714–715, http…
Rope Nets for the Handling of Bombs and Suspicious Packages
A Dangerous Incendiary Device
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Why Paddy Drank: The Social Importance of Whiskey in Pre‐Famine Ireland
Steve Nelson, American Radical
As the immigrant teenage son of a Croatian miller, Steve Nelson arrived in the United States after World War I and entered a world of chronic unemployment, low wages, dangerous work, and discrimination. Following the path taken by many fellow immigrant workers, he joined the Communist Party. He became a full-time organizer and ultimately a major leader, only to resign in 1957 after unsuccessful attempts to democratize the American party. This rem…
The New History of American Communism
American Socialism and Social Biography
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Unity and Fragmentation: Class, Race, and Ethnicity On Chicago's South Side, 1900–1922
Journal Article Unity and Fragmentation: Class, Race, and Ethnicity On Chicago's South Side, 1900–1922 Get access James R. Barrett James R. Barrett North Carolina State University, Department of History, Raleigh, NC 27650 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 18, Issue 1, Fall 1984, Pages 37–55, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/18.1.37 Published: 01 October 1984
Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century
Journal Article Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. By Hasia R. Diner. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. xvi + 192 pp. Illustrations, notes, note on the sources, and index. Cloth, $20.00; paper, $9.95.) Get access James R. Barrett James R. Barrett University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, V…
Steve Nelson: American Radical
Working Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society
The Killing Floor
Coxey's Army: An American Odyssey
Journal Article Coxey's Army: An American Odyssey. By Carlos A. Schwantes. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. xiv + 321 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, and index. $22.95.) Get access James R. Barrett James R. Barrett University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 1, June 1986, Page 223, https://doi.org/10.2307/1903687 Publish…
Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class
Journal Article Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class. By Mike Davis. (London: Verso, 1986. xi + 320 pp. Cloth, $24.95; paper, $10.95.) Get access James R. Barrett James R. Barrett University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 4, March 1987, Pages 1040–1041, https://doi.org/10.230…
American Federation of Labor Records. Part I: Strikes and Agreements File, 1898-1953
Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945
Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922
The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913
Journal Article The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. By Anne Huber Tripp. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. xiv + 317 pp. $29.95.) Get access James K. Barrett James K. Barrett University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 75, Issue 2, September 1988, Pages 645–646, https://doi.org/10.2307/1887955 Published: 01 September 1…
"Local History and Social History "Back of the Yards
The Transplanted: Workers, Class, and Labor
The Transplanted: Workers, Class, and Labor
General history always requires an overall model, good or bad, against which events can be interpreted. ‘No theory, no history’ [Braudel, 1974: xi]. History is more complicated than theory [Vilar, 1982: 50, quoted in Zunz, 1985: 74]. Psychologists tell us that everyone is a bit neurotic. Academics may be a bit more neurotic than most people. When our work is going well, we get suspicious or at the very least we get anxious, always looking for new…
Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922
Journal Article Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922. By James R. Barrett. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. xvii + 290 pp. $24.95.) Get access Henry F. Bedford Henry F. Bedford Albuquerque Academy Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 75, Issue 1, June 1988, Page 285, https://doi.org/10.2307/1889750 Published: 01 June 1988
Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922
Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoeworkers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890-1950
Journal Article Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoeworkers and Tanners of EndicottJohnson, 1890–1930. By Gerald Zahavi. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. xiii + 261 pp. $24.95.) Get access James R. Barrett James R. Barrett University of Illinois, Urbana Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 76, Issue 1, June 1989, Page 277, https://doi.org/10.2307/19…
Mine Town, Mill Town: Working-Class Communities and Industrial Crisis
Militants and Migrants: Immigrant Workers in the United States, 1880–1920
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Political science (45 works) · History (41 works) · Law (37 works) · Sociology (33 works) · History (32 works) · Law (32 works) · Race, History, and American Society (30 works) · Politics (27 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · American History and Culture (13 works)