A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Dunn begins with Ireland's pre-Famine social and political landscape as context for the Ballykilcline strike. The tenants had rented earlier from the Mahons of Strokestown, whose former property now houses Ireland's Famine Museum. In 1847, landlord Denis Mahon evicted and sent nearly a thousand tenants to Quebec, where half died before or just after reaching the Grosse Ile quarantine station. Mahon was gunned down months later. His murder provoked an international controversy involving the Vatican. An early suspect in the case was a man from Ballykilcline.
In the United States, many of the immigrants resettled in clusters in several locations, including Vermont, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, and New York. In Vermont they found jobs in the marble quarries, but some of them lost their homes again in quarry labor actions after 1859. Others prospered in their new lives. A number of Ballykilcline families who stopped in Rutland later moved west; one had a son kidnapped by Indians in Minnesota. Readers who have Irish Famine roots will gain a sense of their own "back story" from this account of Ireland and the native Irish, and scholars in the field of immigration studies will find it particularly useful.
From a treasure trove of "Irish stuff," the reports, minutes, and correspondence of the major Irish-American organizations in Butte, Emmons shows how the stalwart supporters of the RELA and the Ancient Order of Hiberians marched and drilled for Irish freedom---and how, as they ran the town, the miners' union, and the largest mining companies, they used this tradition of ethnic cooperation to ensure safe and steady work, Irish mines taking care of Irish miners. Butte was new, overwhelmingly Irish, and extraordinarily dangerous---the ideal place to test the seam between class and ethnicity.
This remarkable memoir of immigration and assimilation provides a rare view of urban life in Chicago in the late 1800s by a newcomer to the city and the Midwest, and the nation as well. Francis O’Neill left Ireland in 1865. After five years traveling the world as a sailor, he and his family settled in Chicago just shortly before the Great Fire of 1871.
As O’Neill looked back on his life, writing in Chicago at the age of 83, he could give first-hand accounts of the Pullman strike of 1894, the railway strike of 1903, and the packing-house strike of 1904. He could also reflect on the corruption that kept him, in spite of his innovations, extremely high exam scores, and performance, subject to powerful aldermen who prevented his advance as a member of the Chicago Police Department. Despite these obstacles, O’Neill eventually rose to be chief of police—a position from which he could enact much-needed civil service reform. In addition to his professional success, O’Neill is also remembered and beloved for his hobby, preserving traditional Irish music.
O’Neill’s story offers perspective on the inner workings of the police department at the turn of the twentieth century. His memoir also brings to life the challenges involved in succeeding in a new land, providing for his family, and integrating into a new culture. Francis O’Neill serves as a fine documentarian of the Irish immigrant experience in Chicago.
Teachers’ unions are the organizations responsible for safeguarding the conditions of teachers’ employment. Union supporters claim strong synergies between teachers’ interests and students’ interests, but critics of unions insist that the stance of teachers in collective bargaining may disadvantage students as unions reduce the power of administrators to manage, remove, reward or retain excellent teachers.
In A Collective Pursuit, Lesley Laveryunpacks how teachers’ unions today are fighting for contracts that allow them to earn a decent living and build “schools all students deserve.” She explains the form and function of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions. Lavery then explores unionization campaigns in the Twin Cities charter schools. A Collective Pursuit also examines teacher strikes and contract negotiations, school finance and finance reform, and district and union attempts to address racial achievement gaps, to provide a context for understanding the economic, political, and demographic forces that inspire teachers to improve conditions for students.
A Collective Pursuit emphasizes that while teachers’ unions serve a traditional, economic role, they also provide a vast array of valuable services to students, educators, parents, and community members.
A zealous eugenicist ran Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics in the first half of the twentieth century, misusing his position to reclassify people he suspected of hiding their “true” race. But in addition to being blinded by his prejudices, he and his predecessors were operating more by instinct than by science. Their whole dubious enterprise was subject not just to changing concepts of race but outright error, propagated across generations.
This is how Michael O’Malley, a descendant of a Philadelphia Irish American family, came to have “colored” ancestors in Virginia. In The Color of Family, O’Malley teases out the various changes made to citizens’ names and relationships over the years, and how they affected families as they navigated what it meant to be “white,” “colored,” “mixed race,” and more. In the process, he delves into the interplay of genealogy and history, exploring how the documents that establish identity came about, and how private companies like Ancestry.com increasingly supplant state and federal authorities—and not for the better.
Combining the history of O’Malley’s own family with the broader history of racial classification, The Color of Family is an accessible and lively look at the ever-shifting and often poisoned racial dynamics of the United States.
On December 8, 1941, as the Pacific War reached the Philippines, Yay Panlilio, a Filipina-Irish American, faced a question with no easy answer: How could she contribute to the war?
In this 1950 memoir, The Crucible: An Autobiography by Colonel Yay, Filipina American Guerrilla, Panlilio narrates her experience as a journalist, triple agent, leader in the Philippine resistance against the Japanese, and lover of the guerrilla general Marcos V. Augustin. From the war-torn streets of Japanese-occupied Manila, to battlegrounds in the countryside, and the rural farmlands of central California, Panlilio blends wry commentary, rigorous journalistic detail, and popular romance.
Weaving together appearances by Douglas MacArthur and Carlos Romulo with dangerous espionage networks, this work provides an insightful perspective on the war. The Crucible invites readers to see new intersections in Filipina/o, Asian American, and American literature studies, and Denise Cruz's introduction imparts key biographical, historical, and cultural contexts to that purpose.
A compassionate and engaging writer, O'Brien uses the biographer's methods to understand her family history, weaving the scattered pieces of the past—her mother's memo books, her father's reading journal, family photographs, tombstones, dance cards, hospital records, the family silver—into a compelling narrative. In the lives of her Irish-American relatives she finds that the American values of upward mobility, progress, and the pressure to achieve sparked both desire and depression, following her family through generations, across the sea, from the Irish famine of the 1840s to Harvard Yard in the late 1960s.
"Many people who write stories of depression or other chronic illnesses tell tales of recovery in the upward-mobility sense, the 'once I was ill, but now I am well' formula that we may find appealing, but doesn't match the messiness of our lives," she writes. "Mine is not such a tale. But it is a recovery tale in another sense—a story of salvage, of rescuing stories from silence." Told with humor and honesty, O'Brien's story will captivate all readers who want to know how they, and their families, have been shaped by the past.
Inspired by the failed Young Ireland insurrection of 1848 and other nationalist movements on the European continent, the Fenian Brotherhood and the IRB (collectively known as the Fenians) surmised that insurrection was the only path to Irish freedom. By 1865, the Fenians had filled their ranks with battle-tested Irish expatriate veterans of the
Union and Confederate armies who were anxious to liberate Ireland. Lofty Fenian ambitions were ultimately compromised by several factors including United States government opposition and the resolution of volunteer Canadian militias who repelled multiple Fenian incursions into New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba. The Fenian legacy is thus multi-faceted. It was a mildly-threatening source of nationalist pride for discouraged Irish expatriates until the organization fulfilled its pledge to violently attack British soldiers and subjects. It also encouraged the confederation of Canadian provinces under the 1867 Dominion Act.
In this book, Patrick Steward and Bryan McGovern present the first holistic, multi-national study of the Fenian movement. While utilizing a vast array of previously untapped primary sources, the authors uncover the socio-economic roots of Irish nationalist behavior at the height of the Victorian Period. Concurrently, they trace the progression of Fenian ideals in the grassroots of Young Ireland to its de facto collapse in 1870s. In doing so, the authors change the perception of the Fenians from fanatics who aimlessly attempted to free their homeland to idealists who believed in their cause and fought with a physical and rhetorical force that was not nonsensical and hopeless as some previous accounts have suggested.
PATRICK STEWARD works in the Mayo Clinic Development Office in Rochester, Minnesota. He obtained a Ph.D. in Irish History at University of Missouri under the direction of Kerby Miller. Patrick additionally holds two degrees from Tufts University and he was a strategic intelligence analyst at the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington, D.C. early in his professional career.
BRYAN MCGOVERN is an associate professor of history at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. He is author of the widely praised 2009 book John Mitchel, Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist and has written various articles, chapters, and book reviews on Irish and Irish-American nationalism.
As this "Greater Ireland" flourished, new opportunities arose for women and working-class men to contribute within Irish-American society. Exploring the complex interplay of ethnicity, class, and gender, Janis demonstrates the broad range of ideological, social, and political opinion held by Irish Americans in the 1880s. Participation in the Land League deeply influenced a generation that replaced their old county and class allegiances with a common cause, shaping the future of Irish-American nationalism.
In the mid-1960s, Winberg Chai, a young academic and the son of Chinese immigrants, married an Irish-American artist. In Hapa Girl ("hapa" is Hawaiian for "mixed") their daughter tells the story of this loving family as they moved from Southern California to New York to a South Dakota farm by the 1980s. In their new Midwestern home, the family finds itself the object of unwelcome attention, which swiftly escalates to violence. The Chais are suddenly socially isolated and barely able to cope with the tension that arises from daily incidents of racial animosity, including random acts of cruelty.
May-lee Chai's memoir ends in China, where she arrives just in time to witness a riot and demonstrations. Here she realizes that the rural Americans' "fears of change, of economic uncertainty, of racial anxiety, of the unknowable future compared to the known past were the same as China's. And I realized finally that it had not been my fault."
As Ice Age glaciers left behind erratics, so the external forces of history tumbled the Irish into America. Existing both out of time and out of space, a diverse range of these Roman-Catholic immigrants saw their new country in a much different way than did the Protestants who settled and claimed it. These erratics chose backward looking tradition and independence over assimilation and embraced a quintessentially Irish form of subversiveness that arose from their culture, faith, and working-class outlook. David M. Emmons draws on decades of research and thought to plumb the mismatch of values between Protestant Americans hostile to Roman Catholicism and the Catholic Irish strangers among them. Joining ethnicity and faith to social class, Emmons explores the unique form of dissidence that arose when Catholic Irish workers and their sympathizers rejected the beliefs and symbols of American capitalism.
A vibrant and original tour de force, History’s Erratics explores the ancestral roots of Irish nonconformity and defiance in America.
The Invasion, a novel originally published in 1932, marked the debut of historical novelist Janet Lewis, who went on to write numerous poems and short stories as well as the novels The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Soren Quist. Lewis grew up in the Lake country of the Old Northwest and The Invasion is based on family stories she heard as a child.The Invasion displays well-researched historical accuracy, an innate understanding of and feeling for Native American culture enhanced by the author's fluency in the Ojibway language, and an economy of style that is remarkable for a first novel.
In 1790, John Johnston, a cultivated young Irishman, came to the far corner of the Northwest Territory to make his fortune intending to spend only a year. Instead he married Ozhah-guscoday- wayquay (The Woman of the Glade), daughter of the Ojibway chief Waub- ojeeg, and settled on the St. Mary's River. Together they founded a family that was loved, respected, and famous throughout the region for honesty, fairness, and hospitality. Their home was the center of culture for the area and for every visiting traveler, Native American or white. The Invasion chronicles a time when one culture violently supplanted another even as it depicts a family that blends two cultures together.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft considered the Johnston family his most valued connection to the Native American population. He eventually married Jane Johnston, daughter of John and The Woman of the Glade, and remain close to her entire family. In his diary, Schoolcraft wrote of the Johnstons, "I have in fact stumbled, as it were, on the only family in Northwest America who could in Indian lore have acted as my guide, philosopher, and friend."
Ireland’s New Worlds is the first book to compare Irish immigrants in the United States and Australia. In a profound challenge to the national histories that frame most accounts of the Irish diaspora, Malcolm Campbell highlights the ways that economic, social, and cultural conditions shaped distinct experiences for Irish immigrants in each country, and sometimes in different parts of the same country. From differences in the level of hostility that Irish immigrants faced to the contrasting economies of the United States and Australia, Campbell finds that there was much more to the experiences of Irish immigrants than their essential “Irishness.” America’s Irish, for example, were primarily drawn into the population of unskilled laborers congregating in cities, while Australia’s Irish, like their fellow colonialists, were more likely to engage in farming. Campbell shows how local conditions intersected with immigrants’ Irish backgrounds and traditions to create surprisingly varied experiences in Ireland’s new worlds.
“Well conceived and thoroughly researched . . . . This clearly written, thought-provoking work fulfills the considerable ambitions of comparative migration studies.”—Choice
In this profound study, Meredith B. Linn explores three kinds of afflictions—typhus fever, tuberculosis, and work-related injuries—that disproportionately affected Irish immigrants, tracing how existing medical ideas and technologies intersected with American prejudices to further conspire against this once culturally distinct group. Linn makes a compelling case for how Americans’ interpretations of the visible bodily changes wrought by typhus fever and injuries contributed to essentializing and dehumanizing biases against these new immigrants, while tuberculosis—with its symptoms of fatigue, pallor, and emaciation—enabled Americans to see individuals beyond stereotypes and to recognize the equal humanity of the Irish.
Drawing upon extensive archaeological records, folkloric sources, and historical documents, Linn presents what she terms a “visceral historical archaeology”—a perspective rooted in historical archaeology and medical anthropology—to illuminate the experiences of these immigrants. She investigates their health-related ideas and practices and reveals their efforts to heal themselves using popular remedies from Ireland and several new American commodities. Laden with heartrending stories from real working-class Irish and their American doctors, this richly illustrated book provides new perspectives about urban experience in the context of the Irish diaspora and invites contemplation about how illness, injury, and healing have affected the lives and reception of newcomers to the US.
Today over a million people in Illinois claim Irish ancestry and celebrate their love for Ireland. In this concise narrative history, authors Mathieu W. Billings and Sean Farrell bring together both familiar and unheralded stories of the Irish in Illinois, highlighting the critical roles these immigrants and their descendants played in the settlement and the making of the Prairie State. Short biographies and twenty-eight photographs vividly illustrate the significance and diversity of Irish contributions to Illinois.
Billings and Farrell remind us of the countless ways Irish men and women have shaped the history and culture of the state. They fought in the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and two world wars; built the state’s infrastructure and worked in its factories; taught Illinois children and served the poor. Irish political leaders helped to draw up the state’s first constitution, served in city, county, and state offices, and created a machine that dominated twentieth-century politics in Chicago and the state.
This lively history adds to our understanding of the history of the Irish in the state over the past two hundred fifty years. Illinoisans and Midwesterners celebrating their connections to Ireland will treasure this rich and important account of the state’s history.
Irish immigration to the United States can be divided into five general periods, from 1640 to the present: the colonial, prestarvation, great starvation, post-starvation, and post- independence periods. Immigration to the Great Lakes region and, more specifically, to Michigan was differentially influenced during each of these times. The oppressive historical roots of the Irish in both Ireland and nineteenth century America are important to understand in gaining an appreciation for their concern with socioeconomic status.
The Irish first entered the Great Lakes by way of the Ohio River and Appalachian passes, spreading north along the expanding frontier. After the War of 1812, the Irish were heavily represented in frontier military garrisons. Many Irish moved into the Detroit metropolitan area as well as to farming areas throughout Michigan. In the 1840s, a number of Irish began fishing in the waters off Beaver Island, Mackinac Island, Bay City, Saginaw, and Alpena. From 1853 to 1854, Irish emigrants from the Great Starvation dug the Ste. Marie Canal while others dug canals in Grand Rapids and Saginaw.
Irish nationalism in both Michigan and the United States has been closely linked with the labor movement in which Irish Americans were among the earliest organizers and leaders. Irish American nationalism forced the Irish regardless of their local Irish origins to assume a larger Irish identity. Irish Americans have a long history of involvement in the struggle for Irish Freedom dating from the 1840s.
As Patrick Ford, editor of Irish World has said, America led the Irish from the "littleness of countyism into a broad feeling of nationalism."
Examining how Irishness is performed and commodified in the contemporary transnational environment, the contributors explore topics including Van Morrison’s music, Frank McCourt’s writing, the explosion of Irish-themed merchandising, the practices of heritage seekers, the movie The Crying Game, and the significance of red hair. Whether considering the implications of Garth Brooks’s claim of Irishness and his enormous popularity in Ireland, representations of Irish masculinity in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, or Americans’ recourse to a consoling Irishness amid the racial and nationalist tensions triggered by the events of September 11, the contributors delve into complex questions of ethnicity, consumerism, and globalization. Ultimately, they call for an increased awareness of the exclusionary effects of claims of Irishness and for the cultivation of flexible, inclusive ways of affiliating with Ireland and the Irish.
Contributors. Natasha Casey, Maeve Connolly, Catherine M. Eagan, Sean Griffin, Michael Malouf, Mary McGlynn, Gerardine Meaney, Diane Negra, Lauren Onkey, Maria Pramaggiore, Stephanie Rains, Amanda Third
For a brief period after World War I, Irish-American nationalism in Boston became a vehicle for the promotion of wider democratic reform. Though the movement was unable to survive the disagreements surrounding the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, it had been a source of ethnic unity that enabled Boston’s Irish community to negotiate the challenges of the postwar years including the anti-socialist Red Scare and the divisions caused by the Boston Police Strike in the fall of 1919. Furthermore, Boston’s Irish nationalists drew heavily on Catholic Church teachings such that Irish ethnicity came to be more clearly identified with the advocacy of both cultural pluralism and the rights of immigrant and working families in Boston and America.
A little over a century ago, the Irish in America were the targets of intense xenophobic anxiety. Much of that anxiety centered on their mobility, whether that was traveling across the ocean to the U.S., searching for employment in urban centers, mixing with other ethnic groups, or forming communities of their own. Granshaw argues that American variety theatre, a precursor to vaudeville, was a crucial battleground for these anxieties, as it appealed to both the fears and the fantasies that accompanied the rapid economic and social changes of the Gilded Age.
Irish Writers in the Irish American Press spans the period from Oscar Wilde's 1882 American lecture tour to the months following JFK's assassination and covers the century in which Irish American identity was shaped by immigration, religion, politics, and economic advancement. Through a close engagement with Irish American periodicals, Butler offers a more nuanced understanding of the connections between Irish literary studies and Irish American culture during this period.
Not quite a roman á clef of notorious Boston mayor James Michael Curley, The Last Hurrah tells the story of Skeffington’s final campaign as witnessed through the eyes of his nephew, who learns a great deal about politics as he follows his uncle to fundraisers, wakes, and into smoke-filled rooms, ultimately coming—almost against his will—to admire the man. Adapted into a 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy and directed by John Ford (and which Curley tried to keep from being made), Edwin O’Connor’s opus reveals politics as it really is, and big cities as they really were. An expansive, humorous novel offering deep insight into the Irish-American experience and the ever-changing nature of the political machine, The Last Hurrah reveals political truths still true today: what the cameras capture is just the smiling face of the sometimes sordid business of giving the people what they want.
Historian Alan J. M. Noonan uses a range of previously overlooked sources, including collections of emigrant letters, hospital logbooks, private detective reports, and internment records, to tell the stories of Irish men and women who emigrated to mining towns to search for opportunity. Noonan details the periods, the places, and the experiences over multiple generations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He carefully examines their encounters with nativists, other ethnic groups, and mining companies to highlight the contested emergence of a hyphenated Irish-American identity.
Unearthing personal details along with the histories of different communities, the book investigates Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans through the prism of their own experiences, significantly enriching the history of the period.
As Charlie McCarthy is to Edgar Bergen, so is Martin T. Dooley to newspaper humorist Finley Peter Dunne. Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War, originally published in 1898, collects brief, humorous pieces Dunne wrote for the Chicago Evening Post and the Chicago Journal. In an Irish-American dialect as thick as the foam on a pint of stout, Mr. Dooley and his friends discuss the military "sthrateejy" for American action in Cuba, "iliction" day shenanigans, Queen Victoria's jubilee, the "new woman," and the strange American sport of football, in which a player puts "a pair iv matthresses on his legs, a pillow behind, [and] a mask over his nose" and tries to kill his fellow men. Through his tall tales and speculations, Mr. Dooley reveals the pleasure and pain of being Irish in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century.
Clothed in the charming hyperbole and mislocution of the unflappable Mr. Dooley, Dunne's incisive social criticism flies unerringly to the target, exposing prejudice, hypocrisy, insensitivity, and plain old-fashioned humbug.
In New Perspectiveson the Irish Diaspora, Charles Fanning incorporates eighteen fresh perspectives on the Irish diaspora over three centuries and around the globe. He enlists scholarly tools from the disciplines of history, sociology, literary criticism, folklore, and culture studies to present a collection of writings about the Irish diaspora of great variety and depth.
The dramatic story of the fights and compromises that shaped an Irish community
Disdained by many Yankee residents as Catholic lowlifes, the growing Irish population of the Lowell, Massachusetts, “paddy camps” in the nineteenth century proved a tempting source of cheap labor for local mill owners, who took advantage of the immigrants’ proximity to exploit them to the fullest. Displaced by their cheaper labor, other workers blamed the Irish for job losses and added to their plight through repression and segregation.
Now in paperback and featuring a new preface, Brian C. Mitchell’s The Paddy Camps demonstrates how the Irish community in Lowell overcame adversity to develop strong religious institutions, an increased political presence, and a sense of common traditions.
Using Jurgen Habermas’s concept of a public sphere, the author reveals how the Irish constructed a plebian “counter” public of Gaelic meaning through various mechanisms of communication, the ethnic press, the meeting rooms of Irish societies, the consumption of circulating pamphlets, oratory, songs, ballads, poems, and conversation.
Settled in working class neighborhoods of vast spatial separation in an industrial city, the Irish resisted a parochialism identified with neighborhood and instead extended themselves to construct a vibrant, culturally engaged network of Irish rebirth in Philadelphia, a public of Gaelic meaning.
A collection of eighteen critical essays and twenty-six translations spanning the career of one of the founding intellects of Irish Studies, the Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America consists of five accessible sections. The first gathers Kelleher’s essays on the most widely known Irish cultural phenomenon—the literary renaissance of the early twentieth century. Part two contains his judicious assessments of Irish literature in its post-Revolutionary phase. The third section includes Kelleher’s insightful essays on the experience of the Irish in America. The fourth section contains essays that examine early Irish literature and culture, opening with a benchmark essay for Irish Studies, “Early Irish History and Pseudo-History,” which was read at the inaugural meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies in 1961. The collection concludes with Kelleher’s translations and adaptations of poems in Old, Middle, and Modern Irish, illustrating his command of the language at every stage.
In Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish, Howard Lune considers the development and mobilization of different nationalisms over 125 years of Irish diasporic history (1791–1920) and how these campaigns defined the Irish nation and Irish citizenship.
Lune takes a collective approach to exploring identity, concentrating on social identities in which organizations are the primary creative agent to understand who we are and how we come to define ourselves. As exiled Irishmen moved to the United States, they sought to create a new Irish republic following the American model. Lune traces the construction of Irish American identity through the establishment and development of Irish nationalist organizations in the United States. He looks at how networks—such as societies, clubs, and private organizations—can influence and foster diaspora, nationalism, and nationalist movements.
By separating nationalism from the physical nation, Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish uniquely captures the processes and mechanisms by which collective identities are constructed, negotiated, and disseminated. Inevitably, this work tackles the question of what it means to be Irish—to have a nationality, a community, or a shared history.
Over time, the image of the Irish in the United States changed from that of hard-drinking Paddies to genial working-class citizens.
In 'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream, William H. A. Williams traces the change in this image through more than seven hundred pieces of sheet music--popular songs from the stage and for the parlor--to show how Americans' opinions of Ireland and the Irish swung from one extreme to the other.
As Williams shows, sheet music's place as a commercial item meant it had to be acceptable to the broadest possible song-buying public. Negotiations about the image of the Irish and Irish Americans involved Irish songwriters, performers, and pressured groups on one side, and non-Irish writers, publishers, and audiences on the other. Williams ties the contents of song lyrics to the history of the Irish diaspora, revealing how societies create ethnic stereotypes and how such stereotypes evolve, and even disappear, from mainstream popular culture.
Winner of the Myrna F. Bernath Book Award
“A stunning accomplishment…As the Trump administration works to expatriate naturalized U.S. citizens, understanding the history of individual rights and state power at the heart of Under the Starry Flag could not be more important.”
—Passport
“A brilliant piece of historical writing as well as a real page-turner. Salyer seamlessly integrates analysis of big, complicated historical questions—allegiance, naturalization, citizenship, politics, diplomacy, race, and gender—into a gripping narrative.”
—Kevin Kenny, author of The American Irish
In 1867 forty Irish American freedom fighters, outfitted with guns and ammunition, sailed to Ireland to join the effort to end British rule. They were arrested for treason as soon as they landed. The Fenians, as they were called, claimed to be American citizens, but British authorities insisted that they remained British subjects. Following the Civil War, the Fenian crisis dramatized the question of whether citizenship should be considered an inalienable right.
This gripping legal saga, a prelude to today’s immigration battles, raises important questions about immigration, citizenship, and who deserves to be protected by the law.
Though Walt Whitman created no Irish characters in his early works of fiction, he did include the Irish as part of the democratic portrait of America that he drew in Leaves of Grass. He could hardly have done otherwise. In 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published, the Irish made up one of the largest immigrant populations in New York City and, as such, maintained a cultural identity of their own. All of this “Irishness” swirled about Whitman as he trod the streets of his Mannahatta, ultimately becoming part of him and his poetry. As members of the working class, famous authors, or close friends, the Irish left their mark on Whitman the man and poet. In Whitman and the Irish, Joann Krieg convincingly establishes their importance within the larger framework of Whitman studies.
Focusing on geography rather than biography, Krieg traces Whitman's encounters with cities where the Irish formed a large portion of the population—New York City, Boston, Camden, and Dublin—or where, as in the case of Washington, D.C., he had exceptionally close Irish friends. She also provides a brief yet important historical summary of Ireland and its relationship with America.
Whitman and the Irish does more than examine Whitman's Irish friends and acquaintances: it adds a valuable dimension to our understanding of his personal world and explores a number of vital questions in social and cultural history. Krieg places Whitman in relation to the emerging labor culture of ante-bellum New York, reveals the relationship between Whitman's cultural nationalism and the Irish nationalism of the late nineteenth century, and reflects upon Whitman's involvement with the Union cause and that of Irish American soldiers.
The first book in Farrell's five-volume series to be republished by the University of Illinois Press, A World I Never Made introduces three generations from two families, the working-class O'Neills and the lower-middle-class O'Flahertys. The lives of the O'Neills in particular reflect the tragic consequences of poverty, as young Danny O'Neill's parents--unable to sustain their large family--send him to live with his grandmother. Seen here at the age of seven, Danny is fraught with feelings of anxiety and dislocation as he learns the ins and outs of life on the street, confronting for the first time a world he never made.
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