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This is a study of how Irish diaspora shaped musical practice in nineteenth-century America. Moving beyond a focus on the transmission of elements of Irish traditional music to music in the US, or the ways in which Irish Americans used US musical practices to negotiate identities in the New World, Sarah Gerk explores the role played by Irish immigration, as a sociological and cultural phenomenon, and by Irish immigrants themselves in shaping the musical life of the United States. This work offers revealing opportunities to understand race—particularly access to white privilege— diaspora, and musical life in the nineteenth century, as well as to understand how particular musical sounds themselves became bound up with certain diasporic communities and spaces.
Gerk opens by considering the popularity of Thomas Moore’s iconic collection Irish Melodies in relation to the history of British colonization shared by the US and Ireland, arguing that these songs modeled what the music of an Anglo-Celtic republic could sound like. She considers blackface minstrelsy’s complicated relationship with both Irish-American performers and theatrical stereotypes of Irish people, and positions Irish-American performers and audiences as a primary driving force in new musical styles in 1840s sheet music, in which minstrelsy’s resemblances to Anglo-Celtic traditional music disappeared. She examines the legacy of the Great Famine in music of the US Civil War, considering how that music’s role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory. She explores the increasingly elaborate sketches in the 1870s and 1880s of the variety duo Harrigan and Hart, highlighting ways in which violent conflict between the Black community and the Irish lies at the very heart of the Mulligan entertainments. Finally, she contextualizes the work of Irish-American tenor Chauncey Olcott, showing how a number of confluent trends—the growing wealth and social status of Irish-American middle classes, the Gaelic revival, new immigration patterns, and the consolidation of the US’s sheet music industry—allowed Olcott to perform an elevated version of Irish-American musical culture, influenced by superficial elements of Italian operatic music.

Never affiliated with any group or school, Anne Stevenson grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was educated at the University of Michigan where, in 1954, she won a Major Hopwood Prize for poetry. Since 1964 she has lived in the United Kingdom where a restless career as a mother, teacher, bookseller, and skep-tical enthusiast for some poetry has produced many volumes of verse, a highly controversial biography of Sylvia Plath, and two critical introductions to the work of Elizabeth Bishop.
Feminist critics will find much to invigorate and infuriate them in these essays. Stevenson believes that the "takeover" of poetry by critical theorists has, in recent years, all but brought about its demise in England and America. But she also fears that the media's doctrine of mass marketability may have a detrimental effect on the future of poetry. Her essays on Plath, Bishop, Irish poetry, and other subjects are as witty as they are challenging, upsetting many of the easy assumptions of our putatively "postmodern" era.
Anne Stevenson is the author of numerous books, including Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, The Other House, Four and a Half Dancing Men, and most recently, Collected Poems 1955- 1995.

The dramatic story of a Gilded Age murder that shocked people from Chicago to Ireland

It was the biggest funeral Chicago had seen since Lincoln’s. On May 26, 1889, four thousand mourners proceeded down Michigan Avenue, followed by a crowd forty thousand strong, in a howl of protest at what commentators called one of the ghastliest and most curious crimes in civilized history. The dead man, Dr. P. H. Cronin, was a respected Irish physician, but his brutal murder uncovered a web of intrigue, secrecy, and corruption that stretched across the United States and far beyond.

Blood Runs Green tells the story of Cronin’s murder from the police investigation to the trial. It is a story of hotheaded journalists in pursuit of sensational crimes, of a bungling police force riddled with informers and spies, and of a secret revolutionary society determined to free Ireland but succeeding only in tearing itself apart. It is also the story of a booming immigrant population clamoring for power at a time of unprecedented change.

From backrooms to courtrooms, historian Gillian O’Brien deftly navigates the complexities of Irish Chicago, bringing to life a rich cast of characters and tracing the spectacular rise and fall of the secret Irish American society Clan na Gael. She draws on real-life accounts and sources from the United States, Ireland, and Britain to cast new light on Clan na Gael and reveal how Irish republicanism swept across the United States. Destined to be a true crime classic, Blood Runs Green is an enthralling tale of a murder that captivated the world and reverberated through society long after the coffin closed.