Akenson Research Articles

Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O'Connell by Donald Harman Akenson

<i>Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O'Connell</i> by Donald Harman Akenson

Donald Harman Akenson. Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell.

Donald Harman Akenson. Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell.

Discovering the End of Time. Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell, written by Donald Harman Akenson

Discovering the End of Time. Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell, written by Donald Harman Akenson

Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell by Donald Harmon Akenson

Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell by Donald Harmon Akenson

"Like Sailors . . . to a Wreck": Culture and Emigration in Ninteenth-Century Ireland and Sweden

"Like Sailors . . . to a Wreck":Culture and Emigration in Ninteenth-Century Ireland and Sweden Timothy J. Meagher (bio) Donald Harman Akenson . Ireland, Sweden and the Great European Migration, 1815-1914. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2011. 320 pp. Figures, tables, select bibliography, notes, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper). Few historians, indeed, few authors of serious intent, have been as prolific as Donald Akenson, author of more than twenty books and scores of articles and editor of numerous collections of essays. Most of his books have focused on Ireland and the Irish, ranging from historical studies of Irish education, religious life, and local communities to biographies, but his work on the Irish diaspora has been particularly influential, inspiring new studies of the Irish in Canada and Australia and helping to shape how people in Ireland see their "cousins" overseas.1 The volume under review continues to focus on the Irish, but it compares the histories of Irish and Swedish emigration. Such comparisons of peoples in different countries has been a staple of Akenson's extensive work on the Irish diaspora, where he set the histories of the Canadian and Australian Irish against that of Irish Americans to challenge notions that Irish immigrants' experience in the United States could stand for the experiences of all Irish people throughout the diaspora. Here, however, he uses the comparison of Ireland and Sweden to "remove the dead hand of a literary tradition that depicts Ireland as a story unto itself." He wants to place Irish and Swedish emigration firmly in the context of broader European patterns, and, thus in addition to questioning Irish "exceptionalism," achieve a broader goal to "illuminate the causes of the Great European Migration" that extended over the long nineteenth century from 1815 to 1914 (p. 7). Professor Akenson's methods in this comparison are much the same as in his previous work. He is the historian as scientist: identifying sites for research that represent a "nice clean set of laboratories" unpolluted by the effects of extraneous variables; searching for useful, statistical "data sets" from those laboratories; and relentlessly sifting through those sets to draw out evidence for arguments of potentially broad application. His tone and style shift often, [End Page 479] however, from the analytical to the conversational: chatty, step-by-step lessons on evaluating historical evidence, for example; or to the emotional and moral: acidic criticism of conventional historical wisdom or blistering judgments of past historical injustices. The central question in this book is why, when large proportions of Ireland's and Sweden's population were "at risk" for their very survival in the early nineteenth century, only a minority of these vulnerable tried to escape their plight by migrating overseas (p. 39). This he calls "O'Grada's paradox," named after the great economic historian of Ireland, Cormac O'Grada. O'Grada acknowledged that, even though hundreds of thousands of Irish left home in the early nineteenth century, "the reluctance or inability of the Irish to leave in still greater numbers" was a puzzle. The poor Irish seemed to cling to home, O'Grada suggested, "like sailors to the mast or hull of a wreck."2 This was even more true of Sweden in the first half of the nineteenth century, however. Akenson estimates that the proportion of "vulnerable" in Sweden then was not as great as it was in Ireland, but it was still huge, and the number leaving was much smaller. Akenson wants to prove that it was not previously hidden economic or demographic trends that account for this reluctance, but something in the dominant cultures of Sweden and Ireland that held most people back. Searching for evidence of "culture" by trolling through reams of statistics has also been a hallmark of Akenson's previous books. Some people did leave Sweden and Ireland in the early nineteenth century, of course, "leading sectors" as Akenson calls them, but they were "countercultural"—"deviants" from the dominant culture. By leaving, he contends, these "deviants" did not simply escape the smothering culture of the old country, they also "punctured" holes in it and ultimately eased "the quick and efficient transition to a society-wide emigration tradition." Yet even...

Turned Inside Out: Black, White, and Irish in the South

Turned Inside OutBlack, White, and Irish in the South Bryan Giemza (bio) He had seen, one morning as he was going to his work [in New Orleans], a negro carrying some mortar, when another negro hailed him with a loud laugh: “Hallo! you is turned Irishman, is ’ou?” —Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom1 Click for larger view View full resolution The widely recited claim that the Irish in the South were perhaps more misused than slaves is traceable to William Howard Russell (here, 1855), who wrote: “The labour of ditching, trenching, cleaning the waste lands, and hewing down the forests is generally done by Irish labourers . . . . Mr. Seal lamented the high prices of this work; but then, as he said, ‘It was much better to have Irish to do it, who cost nothing to the planter if they died, than to use up good field-hands in such severe employment.’” Photograph courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress. [End Page 34] Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White, a book graced by a pithy name that summarizes its provocative thesis, has generated volumes of response. But relatively little of this body of criticism bears on the South, even though Ignatiev expressly invokes the region in one of the most quoted passages of his study: The Irish who emigrated to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were fleeing caste oppression and a system of landlordism that made the material conditions of the Irish peasant comparable to those of an American slave . . . On the rail beds and canals they labored for low wages under dangerous conditions; in the South they were occasionally employed where it did not make sense to risk the life of a slave. As they came to the cities, they were crowded into districts that became centers of crime, vice and disease.2 Ignatiev’s study, like most treatments of the American Irish, focuses largely on the Northeast, with special focus on Philadelphia. It is worth asking if his observations hold up as well to southern experience. How were the southern Irish identified, in a racial sense, and how did they identify themselves? Did they, in the mode of Ignatiev, “whiten” as well? In a society that came to be seen as rigidly stratified by race, were the Irish in the South commingled in a “common culture of the lowly?”3 As if in reply, historians Peter D. O’Neill and David Lloyd write, “The Irish, it has been shown, became white in the United States precisely to the extent that both slaves and free Blacks were denied full citizenship, even humanity.” And to some extent, this holds for the South, as the case of Charleston’s Irish-born bishop and slavery apologist, John England, illustrates. Some southern Irish found themselves supporting the regional racial orders, willingly or not. There is an attendant sense of disappointment that the Irish did not always seek solidarity with the oppressed: as O’Neill and Lloyd put it, “All too often, the query is posed within a somewhat sentimental framework, one shaped by a weak ethical desire that the Irish should have identified with another people who were undergoing dispossession, exploitation or racism—or, indeed, shown solidarity with oppressed people in general.”4 We might call this the Montserrat Problem, in reference to Donald Akenson’s If the Irish Ran the World, which observes that Irish slaveholders in Montserrat rivaled any colonial power in cruelty. Even Irish nationalist hero Wolfe Tone dreamed of an Ireland that might become a colonial power in the Sandwich Islands, and instances where the Irish played the colonial game to their favor, or the ends against the middle, are not counterfactual fancy, but are exampled in history.5 Now, as the whiteness studies paradigm begins to recede, scholars are more interested in framing the discussion in terms of movement and contact. Because the Atlantic slave trade ended (in principle if not in fact) in 1807–1808—a period when Irish [End Page 35] immigration was on the rise—it is indeed useful to think about the loops of these currents, and the continuing contact they established. Such a framework for interpretation...

Book reviews

A World Among these Islands: Essays on Literature, Race, and National Identity in Antillean America, by Roberto Márquez (reviewed by Peter Hulme) Caribbean Reasonings: The Thought of New World, The Quest for Decolonisation, edited by Brian Meeks &amp; Norman Girvan (reviewed by Cary Fraser) Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination, by Paul B. Miller (reviewed by Kerstin Oloff) Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa’s Gaze, by Maria Cristina Fumagalli (reviewed by Maureen Shay) Who Abolished Slavery: Slave Revolts and Abolitionism: A Debate with João Pedro Marques, edited by Seymour Drescher &amp; Pieter C. Emmer, and Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R . Peterson (reviewed by Claudius Fergus) The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery, by Gustav Ungerer (reviewed by James Walvin) Children in Slavery through the Ages, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers &amp; Joseph C. Miller (reviewed by Indrani Chatterjee) The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, by Peter T. Leeson (reviewed by Kris Lane) Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah, by Keith Sandiford (reviewed by Elaine Savory) Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul, edited by Jennifer Rahim &amp; Barbara Lalla (reviewed by Supriya M. Nair) Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature, by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (reviewed by Lyndon K. Gill) Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, by Kaiama L. Glover (reviewed by Asselin Charles) Divergent Dictions: Contemporary Dominican Literature, by Néstor E. Rodríguez (reviewed by Dawn F. Stinchcomb) The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, edited by Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt &amp; Emma Smith (reviewed by Leah Rosenberg) Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba, by Todd Ramón Ochoa (reviewed by Brian Brazeal) El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader, by Araceli Tinajero (reviewed by Juan José Baldrich) Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959, by Gillian McGillivray (reviewed by Consuelo Naranjo Orovio) The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i, by Christine Skwiot (reviewed by Amalia L. Cabezas) A History of the Cuban Revolution, by Aviva Chomsky (reviewed by Michelle Chase) The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana, by Todd F. Tietchen (reviewed by Stephen Fay) The Devil in the Details: Cuban Antislavery Narrative in the Postmodern Age, by Claudette M. Williams (reviewed by Gera Burton) Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance during the Cold War, by Hector Amaya (reviewed by Ann Marie Stock) Perceptions of Cuba: Canadian and American Policies in Comparative Perspective, by Lana Wylie (reviewed by Julia Sagebien) Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, by Frank Andre Guridy (reviewed by Susan Greenbaum) The Irish in the Atlantic World, edited by David T. Gleeson (reviewed by Donald Harman Akenson) The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Walton Look Lai &amp; Tan Chee-Beng (reviewed by John Kuo Wei Tchen) The Island of One People: An Account of the History of the Jews of Jamaica, by Marilyn Delevante &amp; Anthony Alberga (reviewed by Barry Stiefel) Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname, by Wieke Vink (reviewed by Aviva Ben-Ur) Only West Indians: Creole Nationalism in the British West Indies, by F.S.J. Ledgister (reviewed by Jerome Teelucksingh) Cultural DNA: Gender at the Root of Everyday Life in Rural Jamaica, by Diana J. Fox (reviewed by Jean Besson) Women in Grenadian History, 1783-1983, by Nicole Laurine Phillip (reviewed by Bernard Moitt) British-Controlled Trinidad and Venezuela: A History of Economic Interests and Subversions, 1830-1962, by Kelvin Singh (reviewed by Stephen G. Rabe) Export/Import Trends and Economic Development in Trinidad, 1919-1939, by Doddridge H.N. Alleyne (reviewed by Rita Pemberton) Post-Colonial Trinidad: An Ethnographic Journal, by Colin Clarke &amp; Gillian Clarke (reviewed by Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy) Poverty in Haiti: Essays on Underdevelopment and Post Disaster Prospects, by Mats Lundahl (reviewed by Robert Fatton Jr.) From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964, by Millery Polyné (reviewed by Brenda Gayle Plummer) Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010, edited by Martin Munro (reviewed by Jonna Knappenberger) Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora, by Margarita A. Mooney (reviewed by Rose-Marie Chierici) This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto, by Carol B. Duncan (reviewed by James Houk) Interroger les morts: Essai sur le dynamique politique des Noirs marrons ndjuka du Surinam et de la Guyane, by Jean-Yves Parris (reviewed by H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen &amp; W. van Wetering)

Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration (review)

Reviewed by: Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration David Gleeson Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration by Kerby A. Miller, pp. 411. Dublin: Field Day, 2008. $35.00. Field Day has given Kerby Miller the opportunity to compile his most important articles and essays in one volume, with which he says he hopes to pay tribute "to the Whiteboys, the Steelboys, and others," who "strove with gods against their world's destruction." Established scholars and students alike will be glad [End Page 145] that Miller's work has been gathered in such a way. No longer will they have to search out the scattered and diverse sources, although reading his seminal Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1985), remains compulsory for anyone interested in Irish emigration. Miller introduces the book by stating that he hopes it not only outlines the story but also provides an "understanding" of Ireland and Irish America. Miller divides his fifteen chapters into three sections, and he adds a substantial epilogue, the latter being the most original element of the book. Section one is titled "Culture, Class, and Emigration in Irish Society."Here, he reiterates the thesis outlined so forcefully in Emigrants and Exiles, that the Irish migration experience was in general a very harsh one. The poorer Catholic Irish retained communal premodern values, which emigration destroyed. In Ireland and America these Irish were uncomfortable with the individualism of modern capitalism, and expressed their unease in everything from their correspondence to their language. Miller continues to emphasize that "passivity and fate" dominated migrant lives. Where some sections of the Irish in America displayed cohesion and accommodation with bustling America, such as in their organized supports of Irish nationalism, these merely reflected the hegemonic efforts of the prefamine Irish-American bourgeoisie to establish and "maintain their authority over the Catholic masses." Miller regrets that these poorer and, according to him, often radical masses consented to being co-opted into America and American values in order to achieve the struggle to end British rule in Ireland. These opening chapters are a strong restatement of what Donald Akenson has archly described as the "Celtic-Catholic Handicap thesis." Miller still believes that Irish Catholics justifiably—if not for their stated reasons—felt like exiles in the United States. In his revising for this section, Miller does not address Akenson specifically (indeed, he is never cited), but it is undoubtedly a counter blast to those, like the Canada-based scholar, who criticize his view of prefamine and famine Ireland as well as his description of Irish life in America. Unfortunately, Miller does not answer the charges directly. Section two, "Irish Protestants in Ireland and America," reflects Miller's later career and ongoing research into the story of Irish Protestants and emigration. Influenced by his work with Bruce Boling, Arthur Schrier, and David Doyle for the collection of letters, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan (2003), Miller came to revise some of his earlier views on Irish Protestants. Originally, Miller saw Protestants as "more energetic, industrious, innovative, thrifty, and individualistic—more capitalist-minded, in other words—than their Catholic countrymen." The five chapters included in this section indicate that the Protestant experience was more complicated than originally thought. His 1993 [End Page 146] essay "'Scotch-Irish,' 'Black Irish,' and 'Real Irish': Emigrants and Identities in the Old South," while somewhat overstated, remains thought-provoking. The other chapters are stronger and innovative. He provides a provocative account of the development of an Irish identity among Ulster Presbyterian immigrants in America in "'Scotch-Irish' Ethnicity in Early America: Its Regional and Political Origins," which appeared in Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan. His chapters on "Class Conflict and the Origins of Unionist Hegemony in Early Nineteenth-Century Ulster" and "The Famine's Scars" explore the growing sense of alienation among Ulster Protestants—particularly Presbyterian—from the British political system in Ireland. He correctly highlights how the recent sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland have not been immutable since the Plantation of Ulster, but have ebbed and flowed through the varying political atmospheres. Here, Miller indicates clearly how the experience of Irish emigrants...

An Irish History of Civilization (review)

Reviewed by: An Irish History of Civilization Brad Patterson Don Akenson . An Irish History of Civilization. Volume 1 McGill-Queen's University Press 2005. 828. $39.95 This is a book that is big and lively in every sense. In the space of 800 pages the author guides the reader on a rollicking historical journey, one that stretches over two millennia, visits at least four continents, and introduces a cast of over a thousand individuals. And at the end there is promise of a second volume of similar length to carry the story forward. Long regarded as one of the foremost writers on the Irish diaspora, more recently praised for his work on Judaism and early Christianity, Canadian historian Donald Akenson, at latest count, has authored sixteen major scholarly studies, as well as five works of fiction. Several of the former are already considered to be historiographical landmarks. Akenson has amply demonstrated his mastery of a range of genres, and his publications are characteristically innovative and challenging. The present volume adds further lustre to the list. While arguably there is little substantive that is new, Akenson revisits old preoccupations and looks at them in new ways. The result is an opus by a historian at the height of his powers. The book will nevertheless confound librarians, bibliographers, even casual readers. How should it be classified? How much is fact and how much fiction? Equally, the absence of footnotes and the lack even of a bibliography will, no doubt, irk some scholars. Akenson artfully anticipates such criticisms in his preface. What he is presenting is 'a collection of fictive short stories.' 'Some of the stories are accurate,' he [End Page 195] notes, 'all of them are true.' Moreover, 'not all seeming errors in the text are accidental.' The author's message is clear: take the work on its own terms. For those prepared to do so, there is much to absorb. Commencing with St Paul, coverage extends to the eve of the nineteenth-century famine. Gaelic Ireland, St Patrick, and the Normans are swiftly dealt with, things hotting up with the Elizabethan conquest. Thereafter there is a dual focus as the Irish move to the Americas and the Caribbean. Subsequent chapters outline the spread of the Irish to all parts of the globe. Divided into two 'books,' themselves split into chapters on particular places and times, the kernel of the work is a succession of short pen pictures and anecdotes, often amusing, sometimes horrific, but all with a point to make. Yet what may initially appear to be a disparate pastiche of people, events, and situations quickly emerges as nothing of the sort. The parts are cunningly bound together over space and time through family connections, subsequent actions, and parallel happenings. Irish history, more than most, has been bedevilled by blind believers, the guardians of hagiographic received wisdoms. The author of Being Had: Historians, Evidence and the Irish in North America has never been one to eschew controversy, and nearly every tale in the present volume challenges established 'facts.' The vignettes amplify and reinforce a number of arguments previously advanced elsewhere. For instance, that until the famine those leaving Ireland were as likely to be Protestant as Catholic, if not more likely. That there were few early distinguishable differences between the groups is reiterated. Contrary to what either side would subsequently care to acknowledge, prior to the Devotional Revolution of the mid-nineteenth century, 'people were back and forth across the religious divide like ferrets in a rabbit warren.' They switched for reasons of marriage, survival, or pure ambition. Similarly, nationalist traditions were by no means as fixed as has been suggested. Ideology could be as much a flag of convenience as religion. Further, the proposition that the emigrant Irish were largely exiled victims is again resoundingly rejected. While some Irish may have been driven to leave by hard times or limited prospects, prior to the 1840s few went unwillingly. Ironically, too, once overseas, many of the alleged victims were skilled victimizers in the service of self and empire, whether in the Caribbean slave islands or the Aboriginal districts of the Australian colonies. It is hard to do justice to a...

Sisters of the brotherhood: female Orangeism on Tyneside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

The two ‘great unknowns’ of Irish migration history, women and Protestants, have received deserved attention in the decade or so since Donald Akenson first drew attention to them as lacunae in an otherwise growing field of scholarly concern. A review of the literature, however, demonstrates that Irish women have benefited more than Protestants from recent research. Despite pioneering efforts, much of the work on the non-Catholic dimension tends to be general or indicative in approach, with little of the depth and range now associated with Irish women’s experiences of migration.

'Typical of the New Zealand Occupational Distribution'?: A Reconsideration of Catholic Interwar Employment Patterns

During the 1920s and 1930s, New Zealand Catholics often characterised themselves as a relatively poor community, and mostly engaged in low paid, unskilled employment. In the 1970s, reflecting on the Church fifty years earlier, historian Ernest Simmons claimed that Catholics tried to explain their relative lack of social and career advancement by blaming the Masons and other opponents and by creating 'a myth that Catholics had always been poor'. In his seminal 1990 work on the Irish in New Zealand, Donald Akenson attempted to debunk this myth, declaring that 'the dead centre normality of Irish Catholics is striking' and that they were 'typical of the New Zealand occupational distribution'.

Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, by Donald Harmon Akenson.

<i>Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds</i>, by Donald Harmon Akenson.

"Drifting with Denominationalism": A Situated Examination of Irish National Schools in Nineteenth-Century Tullylish, County down

Due to the complex, contingent relationship among schooled knowledges, cultural hegemony, and oppositionally constructed ethnic identities in Ire? land, attempts to bridge the divide between Catholics and Protestants through integrated schooling have largely failed. Scholarly analysis of this failure has been overwhelming dominated by historian Donald Akenson, whose books provide a comprehensive macro-level outline ofthe structure and context of Irish education from the late eighteenth through the twen? tieth centuries.2 Akenson's pioneering research has provided a foundation for scholars with micro-level approaches to fill in the gaps with material gathered from individual national school classrooms.3

If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730

What would have happened if the had conquered and controlled a vast empire? Would they have been more humane rulers than the English? Using the Caribbean island of Montserrat as a case study of Irish imperialism, Donald Akenson addresses these questions and provides a detailed history of the island during its first century as a European colony. Akenson reveals that the proved to be as effective and as unfeeling colonists as the English and the Scottish, despite the long history of oppression in Ireland. He debunks the myth of the nice slave holder and the view that indentured labour prevailed in the West Indies in the seventeenth century. He also shows that the long-held habit of ignoring ethnic strife within the white ruling classes in the West Indies is misconceived.

Reviews/Comptes rendus

Book reviewed in this article:Geography, Resources, and Environment: Volume I, Selected Writings of Gilbert F. White edited by ROBERT w. KATES and IAN BURTON.Geography, Resources, and Environment: Volume II, Themes from the Work of Gilbert F. White edited by ROBERT W. KATES and IAN BURTON.Farming the Frontier: The Agricultural Opening of the Oregon Country, 1786–1846: by JAMES R. GIBSON.The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History: by DONALD AKENSON.The Myth of the North American City: Continentialism Challenged: by MICHAEL A. GOLDBERG and JOHN MERCER.Power and Place: Canadian Urban Development in the North American Context: Edited by GILBERT A. STELTER and ALAN F.J. ARTIBISE.The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History: Atlantic America, 1492–1800: by DONALD w. MEINIG.Geography and Humanistic Knowledge: edited by LEONARD GUELKE.

The Irish Experience in Ontario: Rural or Urban?

Ce texte constitue une réaction face à plusieurs interprétations nouvelles qui, si elles sont acceptées, risquent de modifier la perception historique du rôle joué par les centres urbains dans l'adaptation des Irlandais catholiques en Ontario au 19e siècle. Donald Akenson, un historien du monde rural, estime que l'expérience canadienne des immigrants irlandais diffère de l'expérience américaine. Il prétend que la prédominance des Protestants à l'intérieur du groupe national, de même que les bases rurales de la communauté irlandaise, empêchent la formation de ghettos urbains et permettent une relative liberté d'action en terme de mobilité sociale. Par comparaison les Irlando-Américains, majoritairement catholiques, sont concentrés dans les ghettos urbains. De surcroît, les nouveaux historiens du Travail affirment que la montée des Chevaliers du Travail suscite un rapprochement entre les Orangistes et les Irlandais catholiques de Toronto qui, en dépit de leur haine ancestrale, s'attachent à former une culture ouvrière commune. Cette interprétation présuppose que la culture irlandaise catholique constitue une valeur bien faible pour être rejetée si facilement. L'auteur estime qu'aucune de ces interprétations n'est fondée. Dans les ghettos torontois, la fusion de la culture paysanne irlandaise avec un catholicisme traditionnel, produit un nouveau courant urbain ethno-religieux — le catholicisme irlandais d'obédience tridentine. Cette culture se propage de la ville vers l'arrière-pays et, grâce aux réseaux de la métropole, d'un bout à l'autre de l'Ontario. Une société irlandaise repliée sur elle-même se constitue, résultant du « privatisme », ceux qui y naissent ne la quittent qu'à leur mort. Les Irlandais catholiques se sont effectivement impliqués dans les organisations ouvrières afin d'améliorer la condition et l'avenir de leurs familles, mais ils ne se sont jamais associés avec leurs ennemis de toujours, les Orangistes, pour développer une nouvelle culture ouvrière.

Between Two Revolutions: Islandmagee, County Antrim, 1798-1920, by Donald Harman Akenson

"Between Two Revolutions: Islandmagee, County Antrim, 1798-1920, by Donald Harman Akenson." Canadian Journal of History, 15(2), pp. 293–294

The Irish Education Experiment: The National System of Education in the Nineteenth Century. Donald Akenson

<i>The Irish Education Experiment: The National System of Education in the Nineteenth Century</i>. Donald Akenson