Irish-American Research Articles

Mick Moloney (1944–2022)

Mick Moloney (1944–2022)

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

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.

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

Trapped in the past: trauma in TheSins of the Mother and Outside Time

This study examines the dramatization of trauma and post traumatic effects in two selected plays: The Sins of the Mother (2008) and Out of Time (2009). The Sins of the Mother is an American play written by Tony Devaney Morinelli that revolves around the plight of an Irish American family struggling because of the repeated pattern of the violent alcoholic mother who suppresses her daughters. In this respect, the play shows the effect of domestic violence. More importantly, the play emphasizes the cyclic nature of traumatic experiences: the daughters eventually inherit the mothers’ sins and repeat their oppressive behavior, as clear in Marie, the mother, and her daughters Ellen and Rose. Out of Time is an Iraqi play that deals with the inability of an Iraqi woman to escape her traumatic memories. Based on The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas LIosa and adapted by The Actor Studio, the play is focused on Zahra, the protagonist, who recounts her painful memories that underscore the misery of Iraqis during Saddam Hussein’s regime and even after its fall. Both plays show the effect of the traumatic past on the characters who are unable to forget, escape, or even cope with painful memories. The aim of this paper is thus to explore these traumatic experiences in the two plays and their dramatization on stage in flashbacks and in scenes in which there is simultaneous existence of the past and present through the lens of Literary Trauma Studies.

An Interview with David Roediger

An Interview with David Roediger Jon K. Lauck JL: Where were you born? DR: The hospital in which I was born was in East St. Louis, Illinois. I have long been tempted to claim I'm "from" there, given how central that city has been to African American creative genius and to the tragedy of race in the Midwest. But in truth the life and livelihood of both my parents was in Columbia, Illinois, a dozen miles south. It was a village of two to three thousand, deeply German American, all-white, and built around grain milling and limestone quarrying. JL: How did your parents and grandparents come to be in this part of the country? DR: My family on both sides came to southern Illinois before the generation of my grandparents, overwhelmingly from what's now Germany but with one branch from Ireland. JL: A fairly large group of Germans immigrated to St. Louis in the early nineteenth century. Would you say your ancestors were part of that urban migration stream or were they more oriented toward farming and rural/small town living in southern Illinois? DR: My family connected to St. Louis much later, with some moving from Cairo, Illinois, and Columbia to the city for work in my parents' generation. The most lastingly German part of the family, my father's side, described itself as coming for religious reasons and to avoid conflicts during German unification. I think they sought rural life, but not a farm. Their religious bent, Missouri Synod Lutheranism, became the main arena for continued identification with one way of being German American. My paternal grandmother was a German speaker, though mostly without anyone to speak to. My mother's family was more [End Page 239] German than Irish in "blood" but just the opposite in identity. They lived near and centered life around an Irish American Catholic church in Cairo. JL: What was your parents' line of work? DR: My mother and her twin brothers became orphans before she was five, her mom dying as a result of childbirth and her dad in a railway work accident. She lived her first seventeen years in Cairo. Her aunts and grandmother sacrificed greatly to send her to two years of normal school for teacher training at Southern Illinois Normal College, now Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She taught in Columbia for forty-nine years, mostly fourth grade. My dad followed his dad into work at the limestone quarry just outside Columbia. While his father worked as a mechanic, my father, back from the Navy and World War II, moved into the office as a bookkeeper. JL: What was your mother's maiden name and what did her family do for an occupation in Cairo? DR: She was born Mary Ann Lind. As noted, her dad was a railroad worker. Her mom was a housewife until dying very young. The aunts who worked to support the household in which she grew up had white-collar, or pink-collar, jobs. One kept books for a coal company and the other was a union phone operator, a job that required considerable skill and an absence of much accent. Opening those jobs to Black women was a demand of the Black United Front in Cairo, one that eventually succeeded but just before the positions were largely mechanized out of existence. When he served as lieutenant governor in the late 60s, Paul Simon sent Dick Durbin to fact find in Cairo. Durbin, now a U.S. senator from Illinois, was an aspiring Democratic politician then. The man taking him to his Cairo hotel room—we know this story because Durbin told it later to Barack Obama who made it public—warned that any use of the phone in the hotel would lead to phone operators relaying what was said to local white supremacists.1 JL: How did your parents meet and where and what year were you born? DR: My mother moved to Columbia to accept the first teaching job she was offered, just as the world war began. My father courted her as he was busily eating bananas in an attempt, ultimately successful, to meet the [End Page 240...

Greece, Poland, and the Construction of American Irish Catholic Identity in the New York Truth Teller, 1820–1845

Abstract The Greek War of Independence (1821–1832) and the abortive November Uprising in Poland (1830–1831) were two major developments in nineteenth-century European history, and both became central to foundational narratives of European modernity. These events have, however, received scant attention by American immigration historians. Despite this neglect, both were integral to how the New York Truth Teller, the leading Irish Catholic newspaper in New York in the years before the Famine, attempted to consolidate an Irish Catholic ethnic identity in the United States. The Truth Teller's contributors interpreted the Greek and Polish conflicts through reference to a specific narrative of Irish history as one of unparalleled suffering. In doing so, the paper kept American Irish Catholics informed about contemporary events in Europe. In comparing Irish Catholic history to the contemporary struggles of Greece and Poland, the Truth Teller insisted that neither Greece nor Poland had experienced suffering comparable to the persecution of Protestant Ascendency Ireland. This article is a corrective to scholarship that has underemphasized the importance of the Truth Teller to Irish Catholic identity in the United States before the Famine and undervalued the relevance of European events for the construction of American Irish Catholic identity.

Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood by Catherine V. Bateson (review)

Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood by Catherine V. Bateson (review)

Percorsi di un italiano all'estero: Robert Viscusi Replies to Rosemary Serra

<i>Percorsi di un italiano all'estero</i>: Robert Viscusi Replies to Rosemary Serra

Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America by John Loughery

Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America by John Loughery

Review: Irish Literature in Transition, 1830–1880, edited by Matthew Campbell

Review: <i>Irish Literature in Transition, 1830–1880</i>, edited by Matthew Campbell

Elizabeth Cullinan &amp; Her "Yellow Roses"

Elizabeth Cullinan & Her "Yellow Roses" Angela Alaimo O'Donnell House of Gold, by Elizabeth Cullinan (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 328 pp. $49.95. The Time of Adam, by Elizabeth Cullinan (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 178 pp. Yellow Roses, by Elizabeth Cullinan (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 208 pp. A Change of Scene, by Elizabeth Cullinan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 192 pp. How did we lose sight of fiction writer Elizabeth Cullinan? Or, perhaps the better question is why did we never really see her, never fully appreciate her subtle storytelling and penetrating vision of daily life as an American Catholic living on the edge of the Irish diaspora in New York City at the dead center of the twentieth century? I first heard Cullinan's name sixteen years ago listening to a lecture by Bronx-born novelist Peter Quinn at Fordham University where I had recently begun teaching. An alumnus of the university, Quinn had returned to give a talk on his genesis and career as a Catholic writer. Speaking of his literary influences, Quinn praised Cullinan's novel House of Gold as the first accurate depiction he had ever encountered of the hothouse world of pre- and newly post-Vatican II Irish American Catholics in the Bronx. "She was telling stories about us," I remember Quinn quipping, "our tribe, with all of its oddities and obsessions, our dysfunctional families and their closely guarded secrets." The authenticity and boldness of Cullinan's work was apparent to other readers, as well. Quinn mentioned his Irish-Catholic mother's disapproval of Cullinan for exposing the private lives of her own people to the common gaze, wondering whether her family would disown her for her disloyalty. In fact, these were the kinds of stories [End Page 69] Quinn himself wanted to tell, the hidden histories he wanted to unearth and reanimate, and reading Cullinan gave him permission to do it, freeing him to become the writer he felt called to be. I responded immediately to this bombshell Quinn had casually dropped, searching out Cullinan's works—her two novels House of Gold (1970) and A Change of Scene (1982), and her two story collections The Time of Adam (1971) and Yellow Roses (1977)—only to discover they were all out of print. Fortunately, I was able to find used copies of the books, and thus began my education about this remarkable American Catholic novelist who had somehow escaped my notice. Quinn, of course, was right. The bona fides of Cullinan's voice and vision, is immediately recognizable even to a reader, like myself, who did and does not belong to the world she describes, in such striking and particular detail. Her stories and characters have the charm of the local—they are often set in the Bronx, in a neighborhood just a few blocks from Fordham, and in Manhattan, a place that is at once mythic and dystopian, the cultural capital celebrated on postcards and the gritty city experienced by millions of citizens as dirty, crowded, and unkind to its human inhabitants. Yet, local as it is, her fiction also has universal appeal, addressing issues of concern faced by all Americans—and especially Catholics—living through the so-called sexual revolution and on the cusp of the Vatican II era. Her characters are almost always Irish Catholics who occupy the full spectrum of practice and belief—including pious parents and grandparents, priestly uncles and convent nuns, and alienated young people with a tenuous relationship to the religion that has defined their lives and their identities, up until now, and seems to have less and less relevance to the secular society they move in. Cullinan herself belonged to this latter generation. Born in Manhattan in 1933 and educated at Marymount College on the Upper East Side, her family suffered from financial setbacks and was forced to move to the Bronx. Cullinan, however, would return to Manhattan to work and live. She got a job at The New Yorker, first as a typist and then as secretary to editor William Maxwell, and eventually began submitting her own stories to the magazine. Over the course of two decades, 23 of them...

Francis M. Carroll. America and the Making of an Independent Ireland: A History.

In America and the Making of an Independent Ireland, Francis M. Carroll maintains that between 1916 and 1928 the United States “performed a crucial role” (xii) in the transformation of Ireland. While it is generally accepted that Irish Americans massively supported the Irish demands for self-government—something the author had already extensively written about, most notably in American Opinion and the Irish Question, 1910–1923 (1978)—here Carroll enlarges the scope of his analysis to the American Senate and House of Representatives and to US presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Calvin Coolidge. Relying on extensive diplomatic archives, private papers, and the correspondence of statesmen in Britain, Ireland, and the United States, along with the local archives of Irish American organizations, Carroll convincingly demonstrates that the United States played a determining part in the achievement of the century-long aspirations of the Irish. Praise must be given to the author for marshaling such a wide, impressive range of archives. His magnum opus will undeniably capture the attention not only of specialists of Ireland and Irish American relations but also of scholars of the First War World, humanitarianism, and the Irish diaspora, together with academics interested in US constitutional law and diplomatic relations.

Repeal, Revolution, Abolitionism: The Formation of Irish American Identity, 1840–45

Repeal, Revolution, Abolitionism:The Formation of Irish American Identity, 1840–45 Robert O'Sullivan (bio) For James Hoban of Washington, DC, a speaker at the National Repeal Convention for the Friends of Ireland in Philadelphia, Daniel O'Connell's campaign to repeal the British-Irish union of 1801 was the preeminent cause of the nineteenth century. It was also the most deserving of American humanitarian assistance in his judgment. Hoban clearly indicated that "our sympathies may be with Ireland as they were with Greece, with South America, and with the suffering Poles." Hoban expressed the hope that Ireland could become the object of the "heart throbbing which made America send a voice of encouragement to Greece [and] to South America when they were struggling to snap the bonds" that had so long confined their limbs.1 For Irish Americans in the 1840s this comparative framework was integral to the manner in which they advocated for Repeal. Comparisons with and references to the nation-building in Spanish America, Greece, and Poland were a common and even crucial component of Repeal speeches. Irish American Repealers depicted their movement as part and parcel of the global developments that had followed the post-Napoleonic Vienna settlement of 1815.2 Between 1808, with Napoleon's conquest of Spain, and the late 1820s the Spanish Empire in Latin America collapsed in the [End Page 141] face of the revolution led by the "liberator" Simón Bolívar that resulted in the emergence of numerous republics across the continent.3 From 1821 to 1829 Greece waged a protracted war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, with its independent borders finalized in 1832.4 And from 1830 to 1831 Polish nationalists initiated a failed revolution against Russian Tsardom.5 Organs of the American popular press also dedicated extensive coverage to the collapse of Spanish imperialism in Latin America. They found resonances with the story of their own republic and believed themselves to be a central inspiration for Bolívar and his followers.6 Likewise, the Greek and Polish causes gripped the popular imagination, largely though extensive coverage of these causes in these same newspapers.7 From 1840 to 1845, when O'Connell's campaign became a transatlantic phenomenon, Irish American Catholics took advantage of American interest in and remembrance of these causes. American Repealers directly compared their own movement with these momentous global events. These comparisons constituted an inventive rhetorical strategy for pressuring non-Catholic Americans into supporting Repeal. Irish Catholic Repealers sought to connect Repeal with a coherent transnational narrative of oppressed revolutionaries pushing toward national self-government and to situate Repeal at the apex of these post-Napoleonic popular-nationalist movements. Repeal speeches across the United States repeatedly drew on romanticized depictions of the virtuous revolutionary causes of Greece, Poland, and Spanish America. In holding up these heroized and celebrated visions of recent world history, Repealers could explicitly compare [End Page 142] their own cause with the others and could argue that they were worthy of association with romantic heroes like Bolivar, and that Repeal was a key feature of this new age. Repealers drew on these examples to expose the hypocrisy of Americans who had donated liberally to previous humanitarian causes, but who were too timid to do the same when it involved challenging British imperial power in Ireland and elsewhere. Repealers derided the foolishness of those who accepted the logic of British liberals who spoke of a progressive, civilizing imperialism, but who did nothing for those eight millions in the most destitute component of the Union; and they exposed the baseless paranoia of those who played into Britain's hands by raising the alarm that Repeal constituted a foreign, popish conspiracy to entrench papal rule in Ireland, strengthen global Catholicism, and undermine an Anglo-Saxon Protestant vanguard. Irish Americans, it was said, could "discern through these contemptible vaporings the power of British influence, even on the free soil of America."8 Repealers attempted to exploit emerging currents of American national identification as the global center of a new humanitarianism that would expand American values, republicanism, and antimonarchical ideals into the heartlands of the European imperial world.9 According to Repeal rhetoric...

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK: Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism. Beth O’Leary Anish

Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK: Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism. Beth O’Leary Anish

Review: Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World, by Malcolm Campbell

Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World is a superb piece of transnational history. For the last two decades, Malcolm Campbell’s work has stood at the vanguard of a historiographical movement to expand the focus of Irish diasporic history beyond the dominant case of the United States to consider other locations around the globe. Ireland’s Farthest Shores marks a fitting culmination to this research project.In his previous work, especially Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States, 1815–1992 (2008), Professor Campbell questioned a prevailing framework among Americanists that traced the social problems of Irish people abroad to their pre-migration culture, in particular a deeply rooted predisposition to see departure from Ireland as exile rather than opportunity. Irish immigrants struggled economically and encountered considerable animosity in the American Northeast, to be sure, yet Professor Campbell found little evidence that they did so in Australia, or for that matter in the American Midwest and West. Using tightly focused trans-regional comparative analysis, he emphasized networks of chain migration, the timing of Irish immigrants’ arrival in settler-colonial societies, the fluid and dynamic character of these societies, patterns of rural settlement, and racism against Chinese immigrants as the dominant themes in Irish American history beyond the Northeast. Exchanges of people and information between California, Australia, and New Zealand, Professor Campbell concluded, took place in the context of a Pacific Irish culture that could be analyzed through cross-regional comparisons as well as transnational interactions. This insight led to Ireland’s Farthest Shores, his broadest and most ambitious work to date.In Ireland’s Farthest Shores, Professor Campbell sets out to explain how Irish migrants shaped the Pacific World and how that world shaped them. Historians have been asking similar questions about the Atlantic World for many decades, but Professor Campbell’s geographical focus is new. He is careful and sensitive in avoiding Eurocentric myopia and bias in defining the Pacific World. Whose world was it, who defined it, and how? He is equally careful in establishing his chronological boundaries so that they do not coincide simply with the age of European incursions, even if Irish migrants were both products and agents of that process. Breaking, like his earlier work, from the nation-state paradigm that shapes many studies of immigration and ethnicity, Ireland’s Farthest Shores places its subject within the dual context of expanding empires and specific regions in the Pacific World, especially in the American West and present-day Australia and New Zealand. The first half of the book examines the process of migration, arrival, and settlement from the early sixteenth century through the late nineteenth century. The second half analyzes how Irish migrants and their descendants engaged with the host societies—principally in Anglo-Pacific regions, as that is where most of them settled—with a focus on religion, radicalism, ethnic nationalism, dispossession of Indigenous populations, and eventual integration into the host societies, in forms notably different from the dominant pattern in Irish America.Thoughtful, deeply researched, and elegantly written, Ireland’s Farthest Shores is not only a powerful and original study of an important and neglected topic, it will be recognized as a landmark work in Irish diaspora history and in transnational migration history more generally.

Richard O'Gorman and Young Ireland on Race, Class, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Irish America

Richard O'Gorman and Young Ireland on Race, Class, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Irish America

Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness by Maureen H. O’Connell

Reviewed by: Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness by Maureen H. O’Connell Donna Toliver Grimes III As the Catholic Church in the United States works to confront the scourge and sin of racism, the timeliness of Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness cannot be overstated. In the sea of contemporary books, podcasts and other platforms grappling with racism in the United States, this is a fresh scholarly exposure through one White Catholic’s personal racial exploration. It stands apart from courageous confessions about slaveholding ancestors and accounts of anxious introductions between African American and White family members. Usually, these stories are rooted in the rural South. Yet, situated in the northern city of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection, this is a bold launch into racism as embedded in good families and the church we love. O’Connell’s book credibly calls out “Anti-Blackness” among Irish American Catholics, their clergy and bishops. Anti-Blackness adds a fine point to the race discussions that we need today in our Catholic [End Page 65] parishes, schools, houses of formation, and organizations; in our families; and between God and ourselves. If we seem to upgrade racism jargon every few years, this book demonstrates that “Anti-Blackness” lays hands on the heart of the matter. Help us, Holy Spirit! Beginning with Irish Catholic sacramentality as a basis for racial reconciliation is intriguing and raised a few questions. Do twenty-first century Irish American Catholics harbor memories of their ancestors’ penitential ritual of rounding (14)? How could rounding or other lament practices serve Irish/White Catholics today? Gardeners and farmers may relate to the author’s detailed grafting metaphor as a description of becoming White Americans (62). Technical descriptions of the grafting process reveal the growth of Anti-Black posturing happening in the family, church, and society concurrently. Although excellent research could not reconstruct ancestors’ racial decisions, it offers sufficient indications that racial issues were among the concerns of five generations who ultimately chose group and self-interest over alliances with African Americans. New immigrants who were Irish and Catholic learned from their priests, employers, and preceding arrivals that “[W]hite disputes could be more easily settled if there were Black bodies on the bargaining table” (48). Is the above quote more or less relevant today? Is racial mercy a form of unearned grace? How is racial mercy related to others in “their chaos”? What spiritual practices open us to receive God’s racial mercy? The Upper Room of Whiteness begs the question of interactions with the women, children and maybe servants off-stage in that sanctuary? How is the hopeful message of our call for more than “being good and giving back” being activated? Donna Toliver Grimes United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Copyright © 2022 American Catholic Historical Society

Songs of Famine and War: Irish Famine Memory in the Music of the US Civil War

This article illuminates ways in which memory of Ireland's Great Famine or ‘an Gorta Mór’ (1845–1852) shaped US music during the US Civil War (1861–1865). Among scholarship on Irish Americans in the Civil War, few sources substantively address lingering memories and trauma from the Great Famine. Yet, a significant amount of the estimated 1.6 million Irish immigrants living in the US in 1860, 170,000 of whom enlisted in the war, were famine survivors. Music's unique role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory in this transnational context. Adopting a concept of ‘private, secret, insidious trauma’ from Laura Brown and Maria P.P. Root, as well as understanding Jeffrey Alexander's ideas about cultural trauma as a sociological process, the article highlights a some of the ways in which famine memories emerged in music-making during the war. Case studies include a survey of US sheet music, the transnational performance and reception history of the song ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, and research on the life of the northern Union army's most successful bandleader, Patrick Gilmore, who left Athlone, in Ireland famine-ravaged West, as a teenager in the late 1840s. The approach is inherently transatlantic, accounting for histories that occurred in the United States, Ireland and the broader Atlantic world dominated by Britain. The essay illustrates how music can contribute to social history, ways in which the application of research on trauma can inform musicological work, and ways in which traumatic memories can emerge across time and distance, particularly in diasporic contexts.

“In sober dignity”: the Irish Brigade, ethnicity, and the Irish Catholic temperance movement in the Civil War era

ABSTRACT This study shows how Irish Catholic temperance groups challenged nativist stereotypes towards Irish immigrants. Irish Americans used abstinence to achieve a respectable reputation among native-born Americans in the Civil War era. By linking Civil War service with the temperance efforts of Irishmen who fought for the Union Army, prominent members of the ethnic group demonstrated that Irish Americans were respectable and virtuous citizens of the United States throughout the Civil War era.