IRISH IN THE CITY: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN AMERICAN URBAN HISTORY

Abstract

Parish boundaries: the Catholic encounter with race in the twentieth-century urban north. By John T. McGreevy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. vi+362. ISBN 0-226-55873-8. $27.50.What parish are you from? A Chicago Irish community and race relations. By Eileen M. McMahon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Pp. xii+226. ISBN 0-8131-1877-8. $32.95.The Boston Irish: a political history. By Thomas H. O'Connor. London: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Pp. xixx+363. ISBN 1-55553-220-9. £23.50.The New York Irish. Edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xxii+743. ISBN 0-8018-5199-8. $45.00.The public city: the political construction of urban life in San Francisco, 1850–1900. By Philip J. Ethington. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xvi+464. ISBN 0-8018-5199-8. £40.00.Civic wars: democracy and public life in the American city during the nineteenth century. By Mary P. Ryan. London: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xii+376. ISBN 0-520-20441-7. £16.15.Few events have had a greater impact on urban America than the Irish Catholic exodus, which eventually brought one third of the Irish to the United States. Irish Catholics were the first ethnic group to immigrate in large numbers to America's cities and to experience overt discrimination. Overcoming that discrimination, they emerged as the consummate political force in urban America. In the late nineteenth century, Irish politicians and their political machines controlled a majority of America's large cities, long before the election of John F. Kennedy as president brought the Irish political presence to the national stage. At once integrated into American culture and proud of their ethnic culture and identity, the Irish in America continue to have a clear cultural presence in both positive and negative ways, in many American cities. The Irish hold the best parades, but sometimes refuse to allow Irish homosexuals the right to parade in them. The Irish are proud of their neighbourhoods, sometimes to the point of physical violence.For the first time in over two centuries, however, Irish immigration patterns have reversed. Over the last two years, 13,000 more Irish moved back to Ireland from America than went the other way. This watershed change provides a good opportunity to reconsider the history of the Irish in America's cities, as the authors of some recent publications demonstrate. This review will examine six current studies that illuminate the Irish urban experience in America. The authors of these histories document the role of the Irish and the Catholic church in urban racial disturbances in the twentieth century; they reconsider the importance of the Irish to urban political culture; and they explore the contested meanings of being Irish in urban America.