The Global Dimensions Of Irish Identity

Though Ireland is a relatively small island on the northeastern fringe of the Atlantic, 70 million people worldwide--including some 45 million in the United States--claim it as their ancestral home. In this wide-ranging, ambitious book, Cian T. McMahon explores the nineteenth-century roots of this transnational identity. Between 1840 and 1880, 4.5 million people left Ireland to start new lives abroad. Using primary sources from Ireland, Australia, and the United States, McMahon demonstrates how this exodus shaped a distinctive sense of nationalism. By doggedly remaining loyal to both their old and new homes, he argues, the Irish helped broaden the modern parameters of citizenship and identity. From insurrection in Ireland to exile in Australia to military service during the American Civil War, McMahon's narrative revolves around a group of rebels known as Young Ireland. They and their fellow Irish used weekly newspapers to construct and express an international identity tailored to the fluctuating world in which they found themselves. Understanding their experience sheds light on our contemporary debates over immigration, race, and globalization.

In the 1830s, as Britain navigated political reform to stave off instability and social unrest, Ireland became increasingly influential in determining British politics. This book is the first to chart the importance that Irish agrarian violence – known as 'outrages' – played in shaping how the 'decade of reform' unfolded. It argues that while Whig politicians attempted to incorporate Ireland fully into the political union to address longstanding grievances, Conservative politicians and media outlets focused on Irish outrages to stymie political change. Jay R. Roszman brings to light the ways that a wing of the Conservative party, including many Anglo-Irish, put Irish violence into a wider imperial framework, stressing how outrages threatened the Union and with it the wider empire. Using underutilised sources, the book also reassesses how Irish people interpreted 'everyday' agrarian violence in pre-Famine society, suggesting that many people perpetuated outrages to assert popularly conceived notions of justice against the imposition of British sovereignty.

The Famine Diaspora and Irish American Women’s Writing considers the works of eleven North American female authors who wrote for or descended from the Irish Famine generation: Anna Dorsey, Christine Faber, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mother Jones, Kate Kennedy, Margaret Dixon McDougall, Mary Meaney, Alice Nolan, Fanny Parnell, Mary Anne Sadlier, and Elizabeth Hely Walshe. This collection examines the ways the writings of these women contributed significantly to the construction of Irish North-American identities, and played a crucial role in the dissemination of Famine memories transgenerationally as well as transnationally. The included annotated excerpts from these women writers’ works and the accompanying essays by prominent international scholars offer insights on the sociopolitical position of the Irish in North America, their connections with the homeland, women’s activities in transnational (often Catholic) publishing networks and women writers’ mediation of Ireland’s cultural heritage. Furthermore, the volume illustrates the generic variety of Irish American women’s writing of the Famine generation, which comprises political treatises, novels, short stories and poetry, and bears witness to these female authors’ profound engagement with political and social issues, such as the conditions of the poor and woman’s vote.

Shows that a rising antipathy in Ireland toward Victorian Britain's expanding global imperialism was a crucial factor in popular support for Irish Home Rule.

"This book offers new insights on the integration of Irish diasporic communities into the fledgling democracies of Australia, Canada, and the United States to which they offered a significant ideological contribution as they engaged with key debates about nationalism, democracy, citizenship, and minority rights"--

Irish people have had a long and complex engagement with the lands and waters encompassing the Pacific world. As the European presence in the Pacific intensified from the late eighteenth century, the Irish entered this oceanic space as beachcombers, missionaries, traders, and colonizers. During the nineteenth century, economic distress in Ireland and rapid population growth on the Pacific Ocean's eastern and western shores set in motion large-scale migration that exerted a deep political, social, and economic impact across the Pacific. Malcolm Campbell examines the rich history of Irish experiences on land and at sea, offering new perspectives on migration and mobility in the Pacific world and of the Irish role in the establishment and maintenance of the British Empire. This volume investigates the extensive transnational connections that developed among Irish immigrants and their descendants across this vast and unique oceanic space, ties that illuminate how the Irish participated in the making of the Pacific world and how the Pacific world made them.

Changes to the landscape of higher education in the United States over the past decades have urged scholars grappling with issues of privilege, inequality, and social immobility to think differently about how we learn and deliberate. Thinking Together is a multidisciplinary conversation about how people approached similar questions of learning and difference in the nineteenth century. In the open air, in homes, in public halls, and even in prisons, people pondered recurring issues: justice, equality, careers, entertainment, war and peace, life and death, heaven and hell, the role of education, and the nature of humanity itself. Paying special attention to the dynamics of race and gender in intellectual settings, the contributors to this volume consider how myriad groups and individuals—many of whom lived on the margins of society and had limited access to formal education—developed and deployed knowledge useful for public participation and public advocacy around these concerns. Essays examine examples such as the women and men who engaged lecture culture during the Civil War; Irish immigrants who gathered to assess their relationship to the politics and society of the New World; African American women and men who used music and theater to challenge the white gaze; and settler-colonists in Liberia who created forums for envisioning a new existence in Africa and their relationship to a U.S. homeland. Taken together, this interdisciplinary exploration shows how learning functioned not only as an instrument for public action but also as a way to forge meaningful ties with others and to affirm the value of an intellectual life. By highlighting people, places, and purposes that diversified public discourse, Thinking Together offers scholars across the humanities new insights and perspectives on how difference enhances the human project of thinking together.

In Ireland, few figures have generated more hatred than Oliver Cromwell, whose seventeenth-century conquest, massacres, and dispossessions would endure in the social memory for ages to come. The Devil from over the Sea explores the many ways in which Cromwell was remembered and sometimes conveniently 'forgotten' in historical, religious, political, and literary texts, according to the interests of different communities across time. Cromwell's powerful afterlife in Ireland, however, cannot be understood without also investigating his presence in folklore and the landscape, in ruins and curses. Nor can he be separated from the idea of the 'Cromwellian': a term which came to elicit an entire chain of contemptuous associations that would begin after his invasion and assume a wholly new force in the nineteenth century. What emerges from all these memorializing traces is a multitudinous Cromwell who could be represented as brutal, comic, sympathetic, or satanic. He could be discarded also, tellingly, from the accounts of the past, and especially by those which viewed him as an embarrassment or worse. In addition to exploring the many reasons why Cromwell was so vehemently remembered or forgotten in Ireland, Sarah Covington finally uncovers the larger truths conveyed by sometimes fanciful or invented accounts. Contrary to being damaging examples of myth-making, the memorializations contained in martyrologies, folk tales, or newspaper polemics were often productive in cohering communities, or in displaying agency in the form of 'counter-memories' that claimed Cromwell for their own and reshaped Irish history in the process.

Redefining Irishness in a Coastal Maine City, 1770–1870: Bridget's Belfast examines how Irish immigrants shaped and reshaped their identity in a rural New England community. Forty percent of Irish immigrants to the United States settled in rural areas. Achieving success beyond large urban centers required distinctive ways of performing Irishness. Class, status, and gender were more significant than ethnicity. Close reading of diaries, newspapers, local histories, and public papers allows for nuanced understanding of immigrant lives amid stereotype and the nineteenth century evolution of a Scotch-Irish identity.

This volume gathers over 40 world-class scholars to explore the dynamics that have shaped the Irish experience in America from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. From the early 1600s to the present, over 10 million Irish people emigrated to various points around the globe. Of them, more than six million settled in what we now call the United States of America. Some were emigrants, some were exiles, and some were refugees—but they all brought with them habits, ideas, and beliefs from Ireland, which played a role in shaping their new home. Organized chronologically, the chapters in this volume offer a cogent blend of historical perspectives from the pens of some of the world’s leading scholars. Each section explores multiple themes including gender, race, identity, class, work, religion, and politics. This book also offers essays that examine the literary and/or artistic production of each era. These studies investigate not only how Irish America saw itself or, in turn, was seen, but also how the historical moment influenced cultural representation. It demonstrates the ways in which Irish Americans have connected with other groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, and sets “Irish America” in the context of the global Irish diaspora. This book will be of value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as instructors and scholars interested in American History, Immigration History, Irish Studies, and Ethnic Studies more broadly.