Abstract
In his "Introduction" to The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, the editor, Michael Glazier, recalls his own emigration from Ireland to America, the "cold winter afternoon when I stood on the deck of the Saxonia and watched Ireland recede into the horizon." More than five million men, women and children shared that experience, watching their native Ireland "recede" and disappear over the horizon as they traveled to a new home in the United States. Today more than forty million Americans trace their ancestry to the people who made that journey. From Richard Butler of Tipperary, who landed somewhere near Ocracoke Island on what is now the coast of North Carolina in 1584, to yesterday's immigrant, and the ten, eleven, or twelve generations in between, the number of Irish Americans must reach into the hundreds of millions. Glazier's compendium of their experience is long overdue, but these sheer numbers and the diversity and breadth of Irish American backgrounds suggest why an encyclopedia of Irish American history is such a daunting task and has not been done before.
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