A joint project of The Irish Institute of New York & The New
York Irish History Roundtable
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996
7" x 10", 744pp., 37 illus.
ISBN 0-8018-5199-8
AVAILABILITY: In hardcover and
softcover through major bookstores
The New York Irish is the history of a three hundred year
relationship between America's premiere city and one of its oldest
ethnic groups.
The volume is edited by Ronald H. Bayor, professor of history at the
Georgia Institute of Technology, and Timothy J. Meagher, archivist and
museum director at the Catholic University of America.
From the Dutch and British colonial periods, through the
Revolutionary era and the early days of the Republic, a steadily
growing number of Irish immigrants and their descendants formed a
distinctive element of the city's population. A flood of new arrivals
during the 1840s and 1850s swelled their numbers, and by the close of
the Civil War more than a third of all New Yorkers were of Irish
origin. During the closing decades of the nineteenth and the first
years of the twentieth century, they dominated the politics and shaped
the cultural, social, and economic life of the metropolis. At the same
time, a distinct ethnic subculture developed that has been sustained by
three surges in Irish emigration to New York during the 1920s, 1950s
and 1980s. Despite several generations of assimilation and dispersal,
the Irish still play an ongoing role in the New York experience, and
serve as a model of adaptation in which ethnicity both survives in, and
is transformed by, the urban environment.
Five essays provide a concise chronological overview of the
interaction between New York and the Irish from the colonial period to
the present. Twenty essays fill major gaps in the historiography of the
Irish in America, including discussions on religious diversity;
entrepreneurship in business; the homefront during the Civil War; the
importance of place of origin on ethnic social life; efforts to foster
the Irish language; how music was an arbiter of social change and
ethnic transmission; the impact of labor and nationalist movements on
local politics; and the social implications of geographic mobility. The
New York Irish also offers new insights into urban and social
history, including relations with African Americans, Chinese and
Dominicans; the medicalization of anti-immigrant prejudice; the
constitutionality of freedom of religious expression; the appeal of
popular Catholicism; the onus of illegality; and ethnicity as
liberating doubleness.
The New York Irish contains over thirty illustrations,
including eight new maps, and statistical tables. Its large, annotated
bibliography has been published separately as The Irish Experience
in New York City.
Ronald H. Bayor & Timothy J. Meagher, editors
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
Contents
Foreword
Paul O'Dwyer
Introduction
Part One: Colonial and Early National America
Overview The Irish and the Emerging City
Leo Hershkowitz, professor of history, Queens College, C.U.N.Y.
Chapter 1: 'Upon a bunch of straw': The Irish in Colonial New
York City
Joyce D. Goodfriend, professor of history, University of Denver
Chapter 2: Religion, Ethnicity and History: Clues to the Cultural
Construction of Law
Walter J. Walsh, associate professor of law, Seton Hall University
Chapter 3: The Development of an Irish-American Community in New
York City before the Great Migration
Paul A. Gilje, professor of history, University of Oklahoma
Overview "The Most Irish City in the Union": The Era of the Great
Migration
Hasia R. Diner, professor of American Studies, University of Maryland
Chapter 4: 'Desirable Companions and Lovers': Irish and African
Americans in the Sixth Ward, 1830-1870
Graham Hodges, associate professor of history, Colgate University
Chapter 5: Quimbo Appo's Fear of Fenians: Chinese-Irish-Anglo
Relations in New York City
John Kuo Wei Tchen, associate professor of urban studies, Queens
College, C.U.N.Y.
Chapter 6: Illness and Medical Care among Irish Immigrants in
Antebellum New York
Alan M. Kraut, professor of history, American University
Chapter 7: Shrewd Irishmen: Irish Entrepreneurs and Artisans in
New York's Clothing Industry, 1830-1880
William Devlin, history teacher, Darien High School, CT and instructor
of geography, Western Connecticut State University, Danbury
Chapter 8: Union Green: The Irish Community and the Civil War
Edward K. Spann, professor of history, Indiana State University
Overview Forging Forward and Looking Back
Lawrence J. McCaffrey, professor of history (emeritus), Loyola
University of Chicago
Chapter 9: Going to the Ladies' Fair: Irish Catholics in New York
City, 1870-1900
Colleen McDannell, associate professor of history and Sterling McMurrin
Chair in Religious Studies, University of Utah
Chapter 10: The Irish Language in New York, 1850-1900
Kenneth E. Nilsen, associate professor of Celtic Studies and Sister
Saint Veronica Chair of Gaelic Studies, Saint Francis Xavier University
Chapter 11: The Irish County Societies in New York, 1880-1914
John T. Ridge, author of The St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York
Chapter 12: The Irish-American Worker in Transition, 1877-1914:
New York City as a Test Case
John R. McKivigan, associate professor of history, West Virginia
University, and
Thomas J. Robertson, instructor of history and philosophy, Allegany
Community College
Chapter 13: 'In Time of Peace, Prepare for War': Key Themes in
the Social Thought of New York's Irish Nationalists, 1890-1916
David Brundage, associate professor of community studies, University of
California, Santa Cruz.
Overview
When New York Was Irish, and After
Chris McNickle, author of To Be Mayor of New York: Ethnic Politics
in the City
Chapter 14: Striking for Ireland on the New York Docks
Joe Doyle, president of the New York Labor History Association
Chapter 15: Of "Morning Glories" and "Fine Old Oaks": John Purroy
Mitchel, Al Smith, and Reform as an Expression of Irish-American
Aspiration
John F. McClymer, professor of history, Assumption College
Chapter 16: "From the East Side to the Seaside": Irish Americans
on the Move in New York City
Marion R. Casey, Ph.D. candidate in history, New York University
Overview
An End and a Beginning
David M. Reimers, professor of history, New York University
Chapter 17: The Neighborhood Changed: The Irish of Washington
Heights and Inwood since 1945
Robert W. Snyder, managing editor of Media Studies Journal at the
Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, Columbia University
Chapter 18: Emigrants, Eirepreneurs, and Opportunists: A Social
Profile of Recent Irish Immigration in New York City
Mary P. Corcoran, lecturer in sociology, Maynooth College, Co. Kildare,
Ireland.
Chapter 19: Irish Traditional and Popular Music in New York City:
Identity and Social Change, 1935-1975
Rebecca S. Miller, Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology, Brown University
Chapter 20: The Heart's Speech No Longer Stifled: New York Irish
Writing Since the 1960s
Charles Fanning, professor of English and history and director of Irish
Studies, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Conclusion
Appendix 1
Statistical Tables
Appendix 2
Maps
Select Bibliography
(full, annotated bibliography published separately as The Irish Experience in New York City by Ann
M. Shea and Marion R. Casey, for distribution by Syracuse University
Press, 130pp., ISBN 0-8156-8121-6)
It is the complicated story of a people who have fought to push out
the boundaries of American nationality to encompass their ethnic and
religious beliefs and in so doing sometimes helped to reinforce the
boundaries of race that kept African and Asian Americans from full
participation in the city's or the nation's life. Throughout their
history in New York, the Irish have been at the border of the ins and
outs, interpreting one to the other, mediating, sometimes including,
sometimes excluding. They have been both victim and victimizer, "other"
and definer of the "other," and, paradoxically, sometimes played both
roles simultaneously. - from the Introduction
The early American republic's first constitutional victory for free
religious exercise did not flow from cold textual analysis but was a
gut response to an appalling and skillful United Irish rhetorical
portrait of ethnic persecution against the native Irish. In its
inception, its argumentation, and its resolution, the first free
exercise case turned on the religion, ethnicity, and history of New
York City's early Irish immigrants. It offers important clues to the
cultural construction of law. - from Chapter 2
Irishmen were also portrayed as short and stocky, the very physique
that pseudoscientists associated with people who were not very active,
but somewhat "slothful" or "lazy." Many Irishmen were depicted as
having coarse red hair, precisely the kind thought to indicate an
"excitable,""sociable," or "gushing" personal manner. If the Irish were
ruddy-complexioned, this was seen as a sign that they were given to
raw, unrestrained passions and self-indulgence. Those with dark eyes
could be expected to be arduous or excessively sensuous. According to
phrenologists in the 1850s, such individuals would not be contented
with indoor or sedentary labor but would gravitate toward outdoor
occupations because they required "a great amount of air and exercise."
That many of the Irish who arrived at mid-century worked on the docks
or the railroads seemed to confirm their "scientific" profile. - from Chapter 6
There had been a number of calls for an Irish-language journal, and
with so many students enrolled in classes the time seemed right. In
1881 Michael Logan started to publish An Gaodhal in Brooklyn.
This largely Irish-language journal marked an important advance in the
Irish language movement in America. Like the Irish-American,
it provided a forum for language enthusiasts, fledgling authors, and
collectors of Irish folklore. It also seems to have been a catalyst in
moving the newly founded Gaelic Union of Dublin to begin publishing its
own periodical, the Gaelic Journal. - from Chapter 10
If [Mayor John Purroy] Mitchel transformed social welfare reform
into a battle with the church and therefore, given the makeup of the
hierarchy, into a battle with his fellow Americans, he turned several
other anti-Tammany measures, most importantly progressive education,
into virtual wars with not just the Irish but also with all the
nationality groups in the city. - from Chapter 15
The sense of seige in the neighborhood was heightened by the
cultural conflict between the old-timers and Latino newcomers. The
streets became a battleground. The Irish blamed the Dominicans for
making them filthy, much as native New Yorkers had blamed the immigrant
Irish for fouling the streets in the nineteenth century. - from Chapter 17
The Irish, one of the first immigrant groups to be analytically
studied, and a group that has been in the United States long enough to
see the full process of assimilation at work, is also part of the new
immigration to America in the 1990s. It is therefore a key group in
America's ethnic mosaic, one that encompassses all the elements needed
to understand the differences and similarities between earlier
immigrant migration, adjustment, and assimilation and the behaviors of
today's arrivals. Its history also sheds considerable light on such
issues as intergroup relations, stereotyping, the development of an
Euro-American identity, the impact of new migration on those of the
group already settled, neighborhood succession, mobility, and gender
roles. Furthermore, the Irish, as a group that challenged the cultural
hegemony of the majority of Americans in the nineteenth century,
provide a good comparative example through which to understand the
friction evident today as the sources of immigration have shifted to
non-European countries. - from the Conclusion
