Howard Lune. Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish.

Abstract

In this slim volume, Howard Lune tells historians of Irish America—and Irish American nationalists—a story that they know much of already, but he does it in an engaging and conceptually intriguing manner that prioritizes the history of organizations over that of individuals or ideologies. Lune, a sociologist, brings to bear his knowledge of organizational theory to study the deep continuity of conviction on the part of Irish and Irish American people who “saw themselves as a nation with or without a state of their own” (3). Lune emphasizes the creation and maintenance of an “organizational field” (4) of Irish nationalism that extended beyond Ireland itself to a larger diaspora of Irish emigrants and their descendants. Over seven chapters, Lune gives us a brisk and readable narrative of nationalist organizing in the United States and Ireland, stretching from the efforts of the United Irishmen in the late-eighteenth century through to the formation of the Irish Free State. After an introductory chapter, chapter 2 focuses on the social imaginary of the United Irishmen and their success in creating a framework for future nationalist efforts despite the failure of their immediate goals. Chapter 3 investigates the role of United Irish émigrés in remaking Irish American associational life and carries the story through the repeal movement of the 1840s. Chapter 4 focuses on nativist pressures and the impact that they had on Irish American organizational life. The fifth chapter focuses on the Fenian movement and the ambiguous relationship between Irish- and US-based physical-force nationalists in the 1860s, after which Lune turns to the period between the Land War of the early 1880s and the Easter Rising of 1916. A final chapter offers him a chance to step back from the narrative and think more generally about the “continuous social movement for Irish independence”—and specifically the ongoing conviction that there was an Irish nation—sustained by various organizations with different immediate goals—from which specific efforts to realize that independence emerged.