Making the Irish American

Making the Irish American
Author: J.J. Lee
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 751
Release: 2007-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814752187

Explores the history of the Irish in America, offering an overview of Irish history, immigration to the United States, and the transition of the Irish from the working class to all levels of society.

Making the Irish American

Making the Irish American
Author: J.J. Lee
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 752
Release: 2006-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 081475208X

This lavish compendium looks at the Irish and America from a variety of perspectives.-USA Today"From the double-meaning of its title to its roster of impressive contributors,Making the Irish Americanis destined for the bookshelves of all readers who aim to keep up on Irish-American history."-Irish America"InMaking the Irish American, editors J.J. Lee and Marion R. Casey have compiled an illustrated 700-page volume that traces the history of the Irish in the United States and shows the impact America has had on its Irish immigrants and vice versa. The book''s 29 articles deal with various aspects of Irish-American life, including labor and unions, discrimination, politics, sports, entertainment and nationalism, as well as the future of Irish America. Among the contributors are Calvin Trillin, Pete Hamill, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the editors."-Associated Press"This massive volume, copublished with Glucksman Ireland House at NYU, covers the Americanization of the Irish in 29 chapters. Eileen Reilly takes a comprehensive, albeit sanitized, look at the history of Ireland up to the present, covering everything from famine to the Good Friday accords. One thing that stands out is the remarkable misogynistic burden that Eamon DeValera''s policies placed on Irish women (a married woman could not teach, and the government seemed to have a vested interest in her sexual habits, even through the 1980s). As the Irish inundated America during the Great Famine, we see them crawl up the ladder of success with the help of the ''Ubiquitous Bridget,'' the indispensable Irish maids whose work spanned two centuries. Novelist Peter Quinn looks at ''Irish progress from Paddies to Pats.'' The importance of labor unions in the rise of the Irish into the middle class is documented, as well as how, through battle in two world wars, the Irish finally earned their acceptance as nonhyphenated Americans, capped off by John F. Kennedy''s election as president in 1960. This extremely thorough, thoughtful volume covers all the Irish bases up to the present."-Publishers WeeklyFeaturing 29 classic and original essays on the turbulent, vital, and fascinating story of the Irish in America. The contributors include Linda Dowling Almeida, Margaret Lynch-Brennan, Marion R. Casey, David Noel Doyle, Pete Hamill, Kevin Kenny, Rebecca S. Miller, Mick Moloney, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Peter Quinn, and Calvin Trillin.All it takes is one St. Patrick''s Day in the United States to realize that the Irish did not dissolve into the melting pot, they took possession of it. Few other immigrant peoples have exerted such pervasive influence, have left so deep an impression, have made their values and concerns so central to the destiny of their new country.InMaking the Irish American, J.J. Lee and Marion R. Casey offer a feast of twenty-nine perspectives on the turbulent, vital, endlessly fascinating story of the Irish in America. Combining original research with reprints of classic works, these essays and articles extend far beyond a survey to offer a truly rich understanding of the Irish immigrant impact on America, and America''s impact on the Irish immigrant.Here the reader will find a brisk, compact history of Ireland itself, and a wide-ranging critique of Irish American historiography, as well as explorations of the multiple complications of religion, reflected in the fluctuating, and sometimes tempestuous, relations between Catholic and Protestant Irish and Scotch-Irish. The authors explore the various channels through which the Irish, men and women, have made their mark, from politics to labor organization, from domestic service to popular and traditional music, from sport to step dancing.Classic reprints include Daniel Patrick Moynihan''s study of the Irish in New York, Pete Hamill''s memoir of President Kennedy-recollecting the responses around him in Belfast at the time of the assassination-Calvin Trillin''sNew Yorkerprofile of Judge James J. Comerford, long the iron-handed bos

Thomas Francis Meagher

Thomas Francis Meagher
Author: John M. Hearne
Publisher: Irish Abroad
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Romantic Young Irelander, republican revolutionary, father of the Irish tricolour and political exile, Thomas Francis Meagher became a citizen of the United States and a leading ethnic spokesman in his adopted republic. Meagher's career remains as controversial today as it was during his own lifetime.

The Irish Americans

The Irish Americans
Author: Jay P. Dolan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2010-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608190102

Follows the Irish from their first arrival in the American colonies through the bleak days of the potato famine, the decades of ethnic prejudice and nativist discrimination, the rise of Irish political power, and on to the historic moment when John F. Kennedy was elected to the highest office in the land.

How the Irish Became White

How the Irish Became White
Author: Noel Ignatiev
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135070695

'...from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called ‘path breaking,’ ‘seminal,’ ‘essential,’ a ‘must read.’ How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.

Irish America

Irish America
Author: Maureen Dezell
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2002-03-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 038549596X

Old-time politics, piety, and St. Patrick’s Day parades loom large when the Irish come to the American mind. None truly represents the complex legacy or contributions of the nation’s oldest ethnic group, who rank among the most highly educated and affluent Americans today. In Irish America, Maureen Dezell takes a new and invigorating look at Americans of Irish Catholic ancestry—who they are, and how they got that way. A welcome antidote to so many standard-issue, sentimental representations of the Irish in the United States, Irish America focuses on popular culture as well as politics; the Irish in the Midwest and West as well as the East; the “new Irish” immigrants; the complicated role of the Church today; and the unheralded heritage of Irish American women. Deftly weaving history, reporting, and the observations of more than 100 men and women of Irish descent on both sides of the Atlantic, Dezell presents an insightful and highly readable portrait of a people and a culture.

1001 Things Everyone Should Know about Irish American History

1001 Things Everyone Should Know about Irish American History
Author: Edward T. O'Donnell
Publisher: Gramercy
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006
Genre: Ireland
ISBN: 9780517227541

Complete yet concise, and beautifully documented with more than 100 historic photos, there is no better tribute to Irish-American history, a cultural cornerstone of our nation. High school & older.

Dagger John

Dagger John
Author: John Loughery
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 579
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501711075

Acclaimed biographer John Loughery tells the story of John Hughes, son of Ireland, friend of William Seward and James Buchanan, founder of St. John’s College (now Fordham University), builder of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, pioneer of parochial-school education, and American diplomat. As archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York in the 1840 and 1850s and the most famous Roman Catholic in America, Hughes defended Catholic institutions in a time of nativist bigotry and church burnings and worked tirelessly to help Irish Catholic immigrants find acceptance in their new homeland. His galvanizing and protecting work and pugnacious style earned him the epithet Dagger John. When the interests of his church and ethnic community were at stake, Hughes acted with purpose and clarity. In Dagger John, Loughery reveals Hughes’s life as it unfolded amid turbulent times for the religious and ethnic minority he represented. Hughes the public figure comes to the fore, illuminated by Loughery’s retelling of his interactions with, and responses to, every major figure of his era, including his critics (Walt Whitman, James Gordon Bennett, and Horace Greeley) and his admirers (Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln). Loughery peels back the layers of the public life of this complicated man, showing how he reveled in the controversies he provoked and believed he had lived to see many of his goals achieved until his dreams came crashing down during the Draft Riots of 1863 when violence set Manhattan ablaze. To know "Dagger" John Hughes is to understand the United States during a painful period of growth as the nation headed toward civil war. Dagger John’s successes and failures, his public relationships and private trials, and his legacy in the Irish Catholic community and beyond provide context and layers of detail for the larger history of a modern culture unfolding in his wake.

The Irish in the South, 1815-1877

The Irish in the South, 1815-1877
Author: David T. Gleeson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2002-11-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807875635

The only comprehensive study of Irish immigrants in the nineteenth-century South, this book makes a valuable contribution to the story of the Irish in America and to our understanding of southern culture. The Irish who migrated to the Old South struggled to make a new home in a land where they were viewed as foreigners and were set apart by language, high rates of illiteracy, and their own self-identification as temporary exiles from famine and British misrule. They countered this isolation by creating vibrant, tightly knit ethnic communities in the cities and towns across the South where they found work, usually menial jobs. Finding strength in their communities, Irish immigrants developed the confidence to raise their voices in the public arena, forcing native southerners to recognize and accept them--first politically, then socially. The Irish integrated into southern society without abandoning their ethnic identity. They displayed their loyalty by fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War and in particular by opposing the Radical Reconstruction that followed. By 1877, they were a unique part of the "Solid South." Unlike the Irish in other parts of the United States, the Irish in the South had to fit into a regional culture as well as American culture in general. By following their attempts to become southerners, we learn much about the unique experience of ethnicity in the American South.

Becoming Irish American

Becoming Irish American
Author: Timothy J. Meagher
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2023-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300126271

The origins and evolution of Irish American identity, from colonial times through the twentieth century "Subtly provocative. . . . [Meagher] traces the making and remaking of Irish America through several iterations and shows the impact of religion on each."--Terry Golway, Wall Street Journal As millions of Irish immigrants and their descendants created community in the United States over the centuries, they neither remained Irish nor simply became American. Instead, they created a culture and defined an identity that was unique to their circumstances, a new people that they would continually reinvent: Irish Americans. Historian Timothy J. Meagher traces the Irish American experience from the first Irishman to step ashore at Roanoke in 1585 to John F. Kennedy's election as president in 1960. As he chronicles how Irish American culture evolved, Meagher looks at how various groups adapted and thrived--Protestants and Catholics, immigrants and American born, those located in different geographic corners of the country. He describes how Irish Americans made a living, where they worshiped, and when they married, and how Irish American politicians found particular success, from ward bosses on the streets of New York, Boston, and Chicago to the presidency. In this sweeping history, Meagher reveals how the Irish American identity was forged, how it has transformed, and how it has held lasting influence on American culture.