Using the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s “Irish Immigrant Letters Home” to Teach Nineteenth-Century Irish Immigrant History

Abstract

AS ANY FACULTY MEMBER who teaches American immigration history knows well, Irish Catholic famine-era immigrants command enormous attention in both the popular media and in scholarly literature. Popular and documentary films, popular and scholarly histories, as well as a host of memoirs and novels all tell various facets of their immigrant story; the Irish, it seems, are everywhere. Consequently, many students arrive in our classrooms with some understanding—sometimes even what they think is a reasonably comprehensive understanding—of the Irish Catholic immigrant experience. Yet as we, their teachers, quickly discover, their knowledge is often limited and romanticized, having been shaped more by popular and sometimes even fictional sources, as well as the values of a popularized Irish ethnic pride derived from a cultivated American Catholic identity, than by a more nuanced, historically based knowledge of these immigrants and their experiences in Ireland and America. As teachers, then, our first and primary task is to deconstruct the understandings students bring with them and substitute a richer, more complicated picture of this immigrant experience. To do that, I, like probably most other history faculty, rely heavily on the use of primary sources. Over nearly ten years of teaching immigration and ethnic history at two different institutions—a liberal arts college in the Northeast and now a large state university in the South—I have confirmed that when teaching immigration and ethnic history—topics that rely heavily on analyzing personal experience as well as broad demographic trends and policies—first-person accounts are one of best tools available to reach students and encourage them to think deeply about the past. Indeed, in reading immigrants’ own words, students gain invaluable opportunities to consider how individuals perceived of their circumstances in both their old and new worlds. Yet much to my surprise and chagrin, when I first designed my course about a decade ago, I found a relative paucity of readily accessible primary sources written by nineteenth-century Irish immigrants either in print or on