Background
James Barrett Swain was born on July 30, 1820 in New York City and was the son of Joseph and Jerusha (Everts) Swain of New York City and a descendant of Jeremiah Swain who was living in Charlestown, Massachussets, as early as 1638.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
https://www.amazon.com/life-speeches-Henry-Clay/dp/B00ACNFDKM?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00ACNFDKM
( In History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out James ...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Bottom-Inside-Out-Working-Class/dp/0822369796?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0822369796
(Looks at unionization efforts by Chicago's packinghouse w...)
Looks at unionization efforts by Chicago's packinghouse workers and explores the process of class formation in early twentieth-century industrial America.
https://www.amazon.com/Work-Community-Jungle-Packinghouse-1894-1922/dp/0252061365?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0252061365
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
https://www.amazon.com/life-speeches-Henry-Clay/dp/B009XYUZ0E?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B009XYUZ0E
(In the newest volume in the award-winning Penguin History...)
In the newest volume in the award-winning Penguin History of American Life series, James R. Barrett chronicles how a new urban American identity was forged in the streets, saloons, churches, and workplaces of the American city. This process of "Americanization from the bottom up" was deeply shaped, Barrett argues, by the Irish. From Lower Manhattan to the South Side of Chicago to Boston's North End, newer waves of immigrants and African Americans found it nearly impossible to avoid the Irish. While historians have emphasized the role of settlement houses and other mainstream institutions in Americanizing immigrants, Barrett makes the original case that the culture absorbed by newcomers upon reaching American shores had a distinctly Hibernian cast. By 1900, there were more people of Irish descent in New York City than in Dublin; more in the United States than in all of Ireland. But in the late nineteenth century, the sources of immigration began to shift, to southern and eastern Europe and beyond. Whether these newcomers wanted to save their souls, get a drink, find a job, or just take a stroll in the neighborhood, they had to deal with Irish Americans. Barrett reveals how the Irish vacillated between a progressive and idealistic impulse toward their fellow immigrants and a parochial defensiveness stemming from the hostility earlier generations had faced upon their own arrival in America. They imparted racist attitudes toward African Americans; they established ethnic "deadlines" across city neighborhoods; they drove other immigrants from docks, factories, and labor unions. Yet the social teachings of the Catholic Church, a sense of solidarity with the oppressed, and dark memories of poverty and violence in both Ireland and America ushered in a wave of progressive political activism that eventually embraced other immigrants. Drawing on contemporary sociological studies and diaries, newspaper accounts, and Irish American literature, The Irish Way illustrates how the interactions between the Irish and later immigrants on the streets, on the vaudeville stage, in Catholic churches, and in workplaces helped forge a multi-ethnic American identity that has a profound legacy in the USA today.
https://www.amazon.com/Irish-Way-Becoming-American-Multiethnic/dp/0143122800?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0143122800
James Barrett Swain was born on July 30, 1820 in New York City and was the son of Joseph and Jerusha (Everts) Swain of New York City and a descendant of Jeremiah Swain who was living in Charlestown, Massachussets, as early as 1638.
James Swain had a general schooling and held an apprenticeship.
After the usual schooling and apprenticeship, his newspaper work was begun on the ephemeral Harrison organ, The Log Cabin, published by Horace Greeley in 1840. While running a private printing establishment in the succeeding years, he found time to publish The Life and Speeches of Henry Clay, the "Life" consisting of an unimportant memoir in the first volume.
After this he was successively owner of the Hudson River Chronicle (1844 - 49), a small sheet published at Sing Sing; assistant on Greeley's New York Tribune; independent printer; city editor on the fledgling New York Times (1852); then the Times correspondent at Albany, writing under the name of Leo.
From 1855 to 1857 he turned for the moment to the very different occupation of state railroad commissioner - one of three - but meanwhile found time to establish the Free State Advocate (1856) and the Albany Statesman (1857) in the interests of Fremont, both short-lived publications.
In 1860 he was again representing the Times, in Washington. One of his real accomplishments in the newspaper field was the introduction of the correspondent system, extensively used before the day of the great news-gathering agencies. Caught in the tide of war, he received an appointment as second lieutenant, and later as first, with authority to raise a regiment of cavalry.
By May 1862, the ranks of "Scotts 900, " as he called it, officially known as the 11th New York, were filled, and, newly commissioned colonel (April 30), he conducted it to Camp Relief at Meridian Hill, Washington, named in honor of his wife.
Odd jobs, such as guard duty and reconnoitering were about all the regiment or its detachments were permitted, and on February 12, 1864, for obscure reasons, Swain was dismissed, the regiment moving to the Gulf under another command.
In 1866 this dismissal was revoked, and he was given honorable discharge.
On his return home, he was appointed in 1865 engineer-in-chief on the staff of Governor Reuben S. Fenton. This appointment led to a rather bizarre adventure in rapid transit development.
A welter of visionary suggestions were in the air, and after unsuccessful projects, first in 1866, and then with the Tweed group in 1871, Swain applied in 1872 for a charter for the Metropolitan Transit Company, which, after a struggle, he secured, with a stock authorization of five million dollars.
His scheme provided for "a three deck highway. . The lowest level to be a subway for freight, the next a slightly depressed road for passenger traffic, and the third an elevated structure from which passenger cars would hang suspended and be drawn by horses driven on the road below".
The service was to extend from the Battery to Harlem River, with side lines. Though he was unsuccessful in soliciting capital with which to realize this dream, his wants were nevertheless supplied by the prosaic positions of weigher in the New York Custom House, 1867-71, Senate reporter for the New York Tribune, and clerk of one of the Assembly committees in 1872.
His fluctuating and varied life was rounded out by a return to his comfortable, four-page, Republican sheet, the Hudson River Chronicle, which he revived in 1876 and which ceased publication with his death.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(Looks at unionization efforts by Chicago's packinghouse w...)
(In the newest volume in the award-winning Penguin History...)
( In History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out James ...)
James Swain's wife was Relief Davis Swain, whom he had married in 1842. One of his sons, Chellis, was a lieutenant under him.