Editors' Notes: Notai na nEagarthoiri

Abstract

If, in the early nineteenth century, a few Americans like Frederick Douglass, traveled through Ireland and altered its social discourse, many more Irish and Scots-Irish came to Antebellum America and altered not only its cities but also the small-town life of its backcountry. Here, Greg Koos, executive director of the McLean County Museum of History in Bloomington, Illinois, traces vernacular education in the frontier states back to the Irish hedge schoolmaster. Drawing on the fiction of William Carleton as well as immigration records, nineteenth-century memoirs, and the historiography of Irish and American education, Koos reveals that schoolmasters of Irish Catholic and Presbyterian origin were often "runaways" from indentured servitude into the backcountry. These itinerant teachers brought with them eighteenth-century educational practices and modeled both Irish folk culture and the sesquipedalianism of the polymath. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln's first schoolmaster was an Irishman by the name of Zachariah Riney. Greg Koos has published articles in Historic Illinois and Material Culture and has edited Irish Immigrants in McLean County Illinois (2000).