Irish Immigrant Communities Research Articles

Mick Moloney (1944–2022)

Mick Moloney (1944–2022)

Virtual Citizenship and Revolutionary Transatlantic Republicanism in the Musical Lives of Exiled United Irishmen

Virtual Citizenship and Revolutionary Transatlantic Republicanism in the Musical Lives of Exiled United Irishmen

“Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism by Peter Buckingham

Reviewed by: “Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism by Peter Buckingham Michael Phillips “Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism. By Peter Buckingham. Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2020. Pp. x, 403. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-755-2.) Thomas Aloysius Hickey, the fiery leftist journalist who cofounded the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance and inspired the formation of the Renters’ Union, which fought for the redistribution of land in Texas, died of throat cancer in 1925. He subsequently sank into obscurity. As noted by author Peter Buckingham, pioneering Texas labor history scholars Ruth Alice Allen and James R. Green began researching the life of the Irish immigrant who became a dynamic force in the Socialist Labor Party and the Knights of Labor before he settled in Texas. Neither was able to produce a comprehensive Hickey biography due to a lack of adequate archival sources. Buckingham, however, discovered a rich trove of papers collected by Hickey’s widow, Clara Boeer Hickey, donated to the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University, where two of the radical’s nieces were professors. This find has allowed Buckingham to produce a vivid portrait of a volatile, pugnacious man who, through his newspaper The Rebel and his tireless public speaking, helped bring socialism to its high point in the Lone Star State in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Hickey had long rejected the Catholicism of his youth, seeing the church as a cowardly collaborator in the British oppression of his homeland. Once in Texas, Hickey appreciated the impact of emotional, evangelical Protestant revivals and brought that style to his political proselytizing. Though Buckingham may overstate Hickey’s role, Hickey’s activism was a major reason that the Socialist Party gubernatorial nominees in 1912 and 1914 surpassed the Republican standard-bearers and that the Socialists became the second most popular party in the state, behind the [End Page 141] dominant Democrats. Finding an explicitly revolutionary message in scriptural passages describing the land as a bounty provided by God to be shared equally by all, Hickey became a star in socialist encampments in which he freely quoted from the bible. He powerfully tapped into the religious sensibility already characteristic of the Texas Left. An outsider, Hickey quickly grasped he could mobilize farmers to battle the rapidly escalating levels of land tenancy in Texas by evoking Christ more than Marx. Unfortunately, Hickey also advanced another central tenet of the Texas catechism, white supremacy. In New York City after his arrival in the United States, Hickey absorbed the anti-Black racism of the Irish immigrant community, which stemmed from fierce job competition. Hickey portrayed African Americans as intellectually deficient, and as sexual predators and enemies of white labor. Buckingham argues that the racism in Hickey’s writings was sporadic and that as he got older, perhaps influenced by the growing racial consciousness of his friend Eugene V. Debs, he moderated his views. One of the few weaknesses of this book is that Buckingham strains too much to absolve Hickey of his bigotry. Nevertheless, Hickey condemned the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco and, rejecting the virulent anti-Mexican racism in Texas, welcomed Latinx tenant farmers into the Renters’ Union and hailed Mexican revolutionaries as role models for the Texas rural underclass. A key strength of “Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism is Buckingham’s detailed and nuanced understanding of revolutionary politics in Ireland that influenced the Texas radical, the interminable internecine struggles within the socialist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the role of Texans who were involved in Woodrow Wilson’s administration in crushing socialism in their home state. This solidly researched book should be of great interest to scholars of labor history, American radicalism, and Texas history. Michael Phillips Collin College Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

A Real American “Spakes English”: Ethnicity, Religion, and Respectability in John Talbot Smith’s “How the McGuinness Saved His Pride” (1891)

A Real American “Spakes English”: Ethnicity, Religion, and Respectability in John Talbot Smith’s “How the McGuinness Saved His Pride” (1891) Lindsay Janssen (bio) The French-Canadian of any rank in life feels that God can confer no greater honor than to make one of his boys a priest, one of his girls a nun. This is a curious view…. The life of the ordinary priest or nun in Canada is not financially a happy one.… It seems to make little difference to the Canadian, as long as his son is the priest. Therefore Protestant missions have found it difficult to bribe this people. Honor seems to mean more to them than soup,1 and they are evidently determined to continue in their priest-ridden condition. We apologize for them to our separated brethren.2 In 1889, author, editor, and priest John Talbot Smith (1855–1923) defended the French Canadians of Quebec to the readers of the New York Catholic World, casting the former as devout believers immune to the lure of financial standing or corruption. Dipping his pen in irony, as he frequently did, Smith took it upon himself to apologize for the ardently religious and virtuous spirit of the French Canadians to those displaying antipathy towards them—“the Orangemen of Ontario…the faction represented by Goldwin Smith,” and several newspapers in Canada and the US.3 British journalist and historian Goldwin Smith made pejorative comments concerning the French Canadians of Quebec, seeing them as a backward, “surviving offset of the France of the Bourbons, cut off by conquest from the mother country and her revolutions,” whose religious “character has been perpetuated by isolation like the form of an antediluvian animal preserved in Siberian ice.”4 Moreover, he warned against a rise in Ultramontanism in Quebec, which he perceived to be a threat to English-speaking Protestants in the province.5 Goldwin Smith’s ideas were disseminated throughout Britain, Canada, and the US, which was demonstrated by the simultaneous publication of his Canada and the Canadian Question—from which the quote above is taken—in Toronto, London, and New York in 1891. Talbot Smith, on the contrary, set out to counter such negative views, and represented Quebec’s Catholics as ardent rather than extremist. When taking Talbot Smith’s fiction into account, it becomes clear that he not only viewed French Canadian Catholics in a favorable light, but [End Page 146] also posited them as an example for US Catholics. In his story “How the McGuinness Saved his Pride,” published in the collection His Honor, the Mayor: And Other Tales (1891), Talbot Smith exposes what he perceived as the potential superficiality of Irish American Catholicism. He does so through an exploration of the exclusionist tendencies of a small-town Irish immigrant community towards the figure of a poor Catholic French Canadian immigrant who tries to assimilate. By the time of Talbot Smith’s literary activity, Catholicism in the US had become practically synonymous with ethnic Irish identity, and the author himself belonged to the Irish American community. Thus, the specific Irish American dimension to his criticism is logical from both a personal and a sociohistorical standpoint. This essay will analyze how Talbot Smith constructs his criticism of Irish American Catholicism and will do so through an analysis of “How the McGuinness Saved his Pride.” Talbot Smith presents his readers with an Irish immigrant community in which religion is inevitably compromised by ethnic differences that are perceived to be insurmountable, labor tensions, and pretensions to middle-class respectability. Within this atmosphere, the narrative simultaneously acknowledges and problematizes the strong links existing between ethnic Irish identity and Catholicism in late nineteenth-century America and achieves this by presenting Irish American Catholicism as a veneer. In Talbot Smith’s story, the Catholic religion serves a means to achieve middle-class respectability but has become divested of those Christian virtues which would give it its actual value: unconditional compassion and acceptance. Talbot Smith was born in Saratoga (NY), a town with a considerable Irish population.6 His parents were Brigid O’Donnell and railroad worker Bernard Smith. In 1881, he was ordained a priest. Eight years later, he moved to New York, where...

Secular Power, Sectarian Politics: The American-Born Irish Elite and Catholic Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York

Abstract This paper takes as its subject the complex ethnic, religious, and political entanglements of the American-born Irish elite of nineteenth-century New York City. Because historians have traditionally viewed the Irish famine as a watershed event in the history of organized Catholicism in New York, the contributions of American-born Irish elites to Irish Catholic political culture have largely gone unnoticed. Having come of age in the early nineteenth century, when institutional Catholicism had scant presence in the Empire City, these lawyers, politicians, and statesmen embraced a secular and metropolitan identity that allowed them to mix easily with the city’s Anglo-Dutch Protestant ruling class. However, mass immigration at midcentury, coupled with growing nativist persecution of the Catholic Church, forced these elites to navigate a middle ground between the secular world of New York politics and the rising sectarianism of the Irish immigrant community. Ultimately, these men would leverage their influence within the Democratic establishment—which at the time remained tied to the pro-slavery Southern elite—to advance the institutional interests of the Church, while reaping personal benefits from the growing power of the Irish vote. Though never fully assimilated into the immigrant community, they nonetheless adapted Irish Catholicism to the hardscrabble world of machine politics, forging an alliance between the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and Tammany Hall that would endure for half a century.

Disruptive Community: The Irish in Argentina. Readings of Rodolfo Walsh and Juan José Delaney

A community is principally characterized by the collectivity of its members and is defined spatially in terms of arbitrary boundaries that consistently separate its inhabitants from ‘Others’ and the “otherness” of the external world. For a number of centuries the diasporic Irish community has been able to forge communal spaces in Caribbean and Latin American nations, most prominently in Argentina. Nonetheless, these Irish communities in Argentine literature are often represented as insular and, therefore, disruptive to the monolithic national discourse of the host country. The portrayal of the diasporic Irish figure, which deviates from patterns of social normativity, constitutes an important facet of these individuals that permits an analysis of the ways in which their presence interrupts the Argentine literary imaginary. As Hellen Kelly observes, “‘deviancy’ in its variant forms has become, therefore, the most accessible and fruitful approach to assessing levels of integration amongst Irish immigrant communities” (128). In order to examine and comment on the various forms of deviations and, at the same time, the levels of integration of the immigrant Irish community, I offer my readings of the three short stories which comprise the “Irish series” by Rodolfo Walsh and Juan José Delaney’s novel Moira Sullivan. I look to interrogate the elements of the diasporic Irish experience which have informed and given shape to representations of diasporic Irish individuals and the spaces they occupy. I also seek to problematize previous readings of the selected texts that have, in general, omitted any critical consideration of and reflection upon their imbued ‘Irishness’ within the context of Argentine literary imaginaries.Keywords: Rodolfo Walsh; Juan José Delaney; Irishness; Irish immigration.

Reverse Currents: Irish Feminist and Nationalist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and U.S. Anti-imperialism, 1916–24

Reverse Currents:Irish Feminist and Nationalist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and U.S. Anti-imperialism, 1916–24 Elizabeth McKillen (bio) During the easter rising of 1916, British troops arrested pacifist and suffragist Francis Sheehy Skeffington while he was out trying to prevent looting on Dublin streets, executed him without trial, and covered up their actions by burying him without notifying the family. They had apparently not counted on the indefatigable detective skills of Francis's wife Hanna, who soon used social networks and political skills cultivated during her career as a suffragist to uncover what happened to her husband. With the assistance of Sir Francis Vane, a sympathetic British officer, Hanna soon forced the arrest and court martial of Captain John Bowen-Colthurst, who had issued the command to execute Francis.1 She also traveled to Britain and convinced Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to launch a broader inquiry into the incident. Yet Sheehy Skeffington proved dissatisfied with the results of both the court martial and the inquiry, and she soon "made up [her] mind … to go to America and to tell [the] story of British militarism to every audience in the States that I could reach."2 Over the course of the next eight years, Sheehy Skeffington spent extensive time in the United States on lecture and fundraising tours on behalf of Irish independence; she also published widely in the [End Page 148] American and Irish American press. Sheehy Skeffington's roles in shaping the Irish nationalist and suffrage movements during this period have received significant scholarly attention, but this article seeks to shed new light on her activism by exploring the ways that she contributed to intellectual currents within both Irish America and the American left on questions of imperialism and U.S. foreign policy.3 Erez Manela in his classic book The Wilsonian Moment emphasized the importance of a transnational flow of Wilsonian ideas about national self-determination in inspiring anticolonial rebellions in such diverse countries as China, Egypt, India, and Korea during the World War I era. Yet, as subaltern theorists have recently insisted, the intellectual flow of ideas was often a two-way street, and marginalized actors from colonial areas sometimes exercised surprising influence over larger and more powerful nations by using their institutions, media, and diaspora networks to disseminate their own ideas.4 For no group was this more true than the early twentieth-century Irish, who enjoyed the benefits of a sprawling and politically influential Irish immigrant community in the United States. An older literature on Irish America detailed the efforts of its leaders and politicians to shape U.S. foreign policy formulation with respect to Ireland and explored some of the disagreements that developed between Irish American nationalist leaders and visiting Irish male rebels such as Eamon de Valera.5 The role of Irish women lecturers [End Page 149] who came to the United States in the aftermath of the Easter Rebellion, however, has only recently received attention. To date, most studies of women lecturers have focused on their success in raising funds for the Irish rebellion and in publicizing the Irish nationalist struggle. Some have also detailed the ways in which these women interacted with Irish American women and encouraged an expansion of female organizational activities within Irish America. Catherine Burns has explored the ways in which both Irish and Irish American women used American patriotic rhetoric to justify their Irish nationalist work. The contributions of Irish women lecturers to ongoing debates about key U.S. foreign policies, however, remain largely neglected.6 Yet many Irish female lecturers, Sheehy Skeffington included, remained in the United States for long periods of time [End Page 150] and proved to be quite popular speakers and political strategists. Although both Irish and Irish American women nationalists emphasized their loyalty to the United States, U.S. intelligence agents engaged in extensive surveillance of their activities because they feared their subversive influence in undermining U.S. foreign policies.7 Sheehy Skeffington's aim during her first lecture tour in 1917–18 was primarily to expose British brutality and raise funds for Irish independence, but her lectures intersected and clashed with President Wilson's policies during World War...

Representing the Irish in Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter. Swift’s American Resonances?

Race is at the centre of Russell Banks’s grand scale novel Cloudsplitter (1998) which traces John Brown’ struggle to abolish slavery in the years before the American Civil War. While Brown’s (and Banks’s) sympathy with Negro slaves is prevalent, the treatment of other social and ethnic groups, such as Native Americans and the Irish immigrants offers insight into the racial and cultural complexity of the United States. The essay identifies the three instances in which members of the Irish immigrant community in the aftermath of the Great Famine that drove them across the Atlantic play a role in this work, including: an extremely young prostitute, a “sad lot” of miners dwelling in shanties, and a gang of “Irish laddies” in Boston who beat up the narrator. It is suggested that these beings could be reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s depiction of the Irish in A Modest Proposal, and the Struldbrugs and Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels, in their circumstances, characterization, and actions.

Representing the Irish in Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter. Swift’s American Resonances?

Race is at the centre of Russell Banks’s grand scale novel Cloudsplitter (1998) which traces John Brown’ struggle to abolish slavery in the years before the American Civil War. While Brown’s (and Banks’s) sympathy with Negro slaves is prevalent, the treatment of other social and ethnic groups, such as Native Americans and the Irish immigrants offers insight into the racial and cultural complexity of the United States. The essay identifies the three instances in which members of the Irish immigrant community in the aftermath of the Great Famine that drove them across the Atlantic play a role in this work, including: an extremely young prostitute, a “sad lot” of miners dwelling in shanties, and a gang of “Irish laddies” in Boston who beat up the narrator. It is suggested that these beings could be reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s depiction of the Irish in A Modest Proposal, and the Struldbrugs and Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels, in their circumstances, characterization, and actions.

Building New Lives, Maintaining Old Identities: Irish Associations in Michigan’s Copper Country, 1860-1900

Building New Lives, Maintaining Old Identities: Irish Associations in Michigan’s Copper Country, 1860-1900 William H. Mulligan Jr. The celebration of Saint Patrick’s Day is a common event throughout the Irish diaspora. In the United States, its celebration dates back to the colonial period with observances in Boston and Savannah among other cities with Irish populations. Notably, St. Patrick’s Day has not always been an Irish Catholic observance. As Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair suggest in their history of the day, The Wearing of the Green (2002), the holiday deserves more serious attention from scholars than it has received, if only because the celebrations offer a window into each particular community, and how the community defined itself and responded to the challenges it faced at various times in its history.1 That is certainly the case in the Michigan Copper Country, an area in the Upper Peninsula comprising Keweenaw, Baraga, Houghton, and Ontonogan Counties. There, St. Patrick’s Day was the central event in the various Irish communities’ year. However, the observance was only one part of the communities’ efforts to keep in touch with events in Ireland and to maintain Irish identity. In addition to their March 17 celebrations, the Irish of the Upper Peninsula established and supported a number of organizations. Those organizations and their activities give us an insight into the lives and concerns of the Irish in Michigan’s Copper Country, who unfortunately have left few direct records of their lives. Ethnic organizations have been, and remain, an important way in which all American immigrant groups have dealt with the tensions, pressures, and adjustments inherent in migration.2 These organizations played varied roles in the lives of their members. Most provided protection from the uncertainties of life in a frequently hostile and dangerous new environment; others helped continue familiar cultural practices and customs; and all ethnic organizations [End Page 109] provided opportunities to fill positions involving leadership and responsibility often denied immigrants and their children by the larger society. Collectively, such organizations helped to create and sustain a sense of community among newcomers.3 Of course, non-immigrant, native-born Americans were equally active in fraternal and benevolent organizations. For much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Americans participated in social, fraternal, and benevolent societies on a scale that invariably drew the attention and comments of European travelers. In this respect, Irish immigrants in Michigan’s Copper Country during the last half of the nineteenth century were not different from other immigrant groups. They formed a large number of organizations that served various purposes in their new home. No formal records of any of these organizations appear to be extant—or at least, none have yet been found—but their activities were covered extensively in the region’s newspapers, among them the Portage Lake Mining Gazette, the Copper Country Evening News, and the Northwestern Mining Journal. This press coverage makes it possible to reconstruct much of this aspect of Irish immigrant life in the Michigan Copper Country. Many of the organizations that Copper Country Irish immigrants formed were similar in purpose to those of other ethnic groups, both in the Copper Country and elsewhere; one of the most frequent purposes was to provide for a proper wake and burial as well as some modest monetary benefits for surviving widows and children. Nonetheless, distinctly Irish groups and purposes do form part of the associational history of the region. They reflect the continuing interest and involvement of the Irish of the diaspora in political and economic events unfolding in Ireland, such as Fenianism, the Land League, and the cause of Irish freedom most generally. It is difficult to determine if the concerns of these organizations were based on the Irish experience of the men and women of the Copper Country—but they clearly reflect an awareness of and deep interest in events in Ireland The experience of the mid-nineteenth century Irish immigrants in the Copper Country differed, in some ways, from that of other Irish immigrant communities. They were, to a substantial degree, skilled workers and among the pioneer settlers of the region. A significant portion of the men were experienced...

The Country of the Young: Interpretations of Youth and Childhood in Irish Culture ed. by John Countryman, Kelly Matthews (review)

Reviewed by: The Country of the Young: Interpretations of Youth and Childhood in Irish Culture ed. by John Countryman, Kelly Matthews Jeanette Roberts Shumaker (bio) The Country of the Young: Interpretations of Youth and Childhood in Irish Culture. Edited by John Countryman and Kelly Matthews. Dublin: Four Courts, 2013. Quoting “That is no country for old men” from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” Kelly Matthews opens this volume with the contention that Ireland since the Famine of the 1840s has been preoccupied with its children and young adults (1). Matthews and coeditor John Countryman have collected a variety of essays around this theme. Three of them provide historical studies of Irish youth culture, while the other six examine childhood and youth in novels, films, and plays from both Ireland and Northern Ireland. In an absorbing study of Irish women’s life writings from 1850 to 1950, Cara Delay discusses the influence that mothers had on their daughters’ piety and self-concept. She argues that mothers, more than the nuns who taught girls in school, “were the foundation” of girls’ “religious experiences” (23). In addition, working-class Irish mothers asserted their moral authority in the home when they competed with each other over who could create the best religious display, whether it involved banners, altars, or holy pictures (17–18). Delay sees women’s life writings as complicating the stereotype that a childhood spent in the Irish countryside was Edenic or in the city, dreadful: “The idyllic rural childhood is interrupted by moments of fear, shame and anxiety; the rough-and-tumble urban childhood reveals flashes of joy and comfort” (14). Describing how the Sisters of Charity educated Irish children in Albany, New York, from 1828 to 1847, Margaret Lasch Carroll explores the central role of these nuns in moving Albany’s Irish immigrant community out of poverty. She also posits that the nuns laid the foundation for the “network of social services” in Albany that helped numerous immigrants escaping the Irish Famine from 1845 to 1860 (48). Returning to Ireland itself, Gavin Foster memorably traces the recasting of young revolutionaries, who were called “heroes” before the civil war of 1922–1924, but renamed “black-guards” during its duration (51). The faction who favored the 1921 treaty with the British that gave up Northern Ireland in exchange for Ireland’s autonomy used such subtle propaganda to discredit their opponents; meanwhile, those opponents, who were eventually defeated, continued to praise the youth culture of the Irish revolutionary (66). Like Foster, Susan Cahill examines the ideology of Ireland’s past with a skeptical eye. She discusses a popular Irish children’s writer of the 1930s, Máirín Cregan, who is little known today. What made Cregan’s original Irish fairy tale, Old John, popular in 1937 was “her close connections to the [End Page 166] Fianna Fail administration of the time in both political and cultural terms” (70). Cahill then uncovers “conservative Free State notions of femininity” in Cregan’s pony story, Rathina (78). While critics often make connections between Irish novelists for adults and James Joyce, it is unusual to see links made between Joyce and novelists for young adults. Thomas O’Grady creates such links, examining a late twentieth-century young adult novel and a memoir by Ferdia Mac Anna. O’Grady contemplates “the Joycean . . . bildungsroman tradition” to see “how immediacies of place and time are crucial determinants in the emergence of the mature individual from the crucible of childhood and adolescence” (87). The originality of O’Grady’s approach is equaled by Caitriona Moloney’s. Discussing Anne Enright’s 2007 Booker Prize–winning novel The Gathering, Moloney adds to the critical conversation about the novel’s allusions to the clerical child abuse scandal by turning her attention to its criticism of the Irish family. She observes that “Unlike many social commentators whose criticism is reserved for men and the Catholic church, Enright is also particularly hard on mothers” (112). Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt discusses another contemporary Irish work for adults that concerns children who live away from their parents for a period of weeks or months, Claire Keegan’s novella Foster. Fitzgerald-Hoyt exposes new dimensions in Keegan’s work...

Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945 by Jennifer Guglielmo

122 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY developed, in part as a consequence of the author’s preoccupation with the question of Robinson’s identity. For the newspapermen who kept the mystery before the public, Robinson’s veil could only be imagined as concealing a genteel woman who had fallen into disgrace. During and after the trial, we learn, Robinson was linked to a prominent Troy family, including a former student of Troy Female Seminary. Adler considers this claim at length, before exploring the more plausible scenario that Robinson was in fact an Anglo-Irish immigrant. But Robinson’s association with fallen gentility, rather than the immigrant Irish she lived among and killed, suggests a fascinating if unexplored class politics at work, both in Robinson’s history and the history of her notoriety. Likewise, it would have helped had Adler extended her investigation into Troy’s Irish immigrant community. Indeed, there are several missed opportunities for historical analysis here. This volume might have been a gritty exploration of antebellum political culture, the urban Irish, the immigrant underworld, and conceptions of crime, madness, and sexuality; instead, Adler’s discussion of such topics serves to illuminate the trial and support her investigation into Robinson’s identity. Yet, despite these shortcomings, this remains a fascinating story, one that will be of interest to scholars of urban life, crime, politics , and gender in nineteenth-century America. Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945. By Jennifer Guglielmo, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 432 pages, $41.95 Cloth. Reviewed by Denise Lynn, Assistant Professor, History, University of Southern Indiana. Jennifer Guglielmo’s Living the Revolution seeks to highlight the silences in the historical literature about Italian immigrant women engaged in radical politics in the United States from 1880 to 1945. This activism was lost to us because historians have focused primarily on English-language sources and contemporaries believed Italian women were “unorganizable” and shackled by male authority. Additionally these women were caught Book Reviews 123 up in what Guglielmo describes as a diaspora that included South America and frequent and sometimes permanent return to Italy. This activism did not resemble the radical politics of other women or even Italian men. For one, these women did not seek inclusion into the United States polity nor did they initially work within established working-class organizations, like trade unions. Rather they drew on strategies adopted from Italy that included mutual aid, neighborhood organization, and direct action. Guglielmo argues that Italian radicalism is rooted in the upheavals of late nineteenth-century Italy where women became leaders in local protests against authority and industrial abuse. Meanwhile Italian men frequently migrated to the United States or South America to find work; leaving women to fend for themselves and their children. This allowed them to push the boundaries of appropriate female behavior. Many women also migrated and had to take on work that their families depended on for survival. In America, Italian women’s skilled labor, specifically sewing, became associated with unskilled, menial, and thus low-waged labor creating a “fabricated absence.” Meaning, Italian women were portrayed in the press as physically able to do hard labor yet they were docile; so their demanding and demeaning work was slandered and devalued (77). Guglielmo argues that radical activism was also racialized. Southern Italians were portrayed as primitives in Italy. In the United States racialization took on a different form vis-à-vis nonwhites. Italians were considered whites, but inferior whites. This racialization was also gendered as Italian women were painted as victims; in contrast, Chinese and AfricanAmerican women were more often viewed as perpetrators. Therefore, middle-class, white, female reformers, who were challenging gender conventions , found Italian women worthy of rescue. This racialization meant that while Italians were still believed to be inferior they could claim white status and enjoy the benefits of citizenship and state protection. Employers also used this ethnic conflict to their advantage to ensure worker discipline and reduce turnover. Guglielmo devotes the first half of the text to contextualizing Italian immigrant women’s roots in Italian radical politics and their place in immigration history, thus the volume’s title is somewhat misleading...

Gaelic Games, Irish Nationalist Politics and the Irish Diaspora in London, 1895–1915

This article makes an original contribution to the growing historiography on the role of sport, and more specifically, Gaelic games amongst Irish immigrant communities around the world. It does so by shedding light on the origins and early history of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century London. In particular, the article explores the ways in which membership of this organisation allowed sections of the city's Irish population to preserve and express their ethnic specificity and support for Irish nationalism. This reveals that Gaelic games were drawn on by a diverse range of organisations and individuals who sought to utilise these sports to galvanise support for varying shades of Irish nationalism.

Collective Identities, the Catholic Temperance Movement, and Father Mathew: The Social History of a Teacup

Symbols found on various objects signify and express group identity. They reflect the larger history or collective social relations and e x p e r i e n c e s o f a p a r t i c u l a r g ro u p . Archeological study linking objects, decorative types, and symbols is especially significant in socio-historical contexts that involve the exile and migration of people from their homeland and their subsequent alienation in the new place of settlement. The structure of group formation consists of the people's memory (real or imaginary) of their homeland, their worldview, and their current experiences of injustice. The symbolism conveys the meaning of injustice and hope. The 19th century was a dynamic and contentious period in Irish immigrant history in the United States. The large numbers of Irish Catholics arriving daily to the United States caused fear and mistrust among the non-Irish, American-born Protestants. In this manuscript, I address the materialization of 19th-century class and religious conflict and the negotiation between the Irish immigrant community and mainstream native-born Americans in New York City by exploring the meaning embedded within a refined white earthenware teacup decorated with the image of Father Theobald Mathew. The cup was discovered during the excavation of a midto late-19th-century, predominantly Irish immigrant section of New York City known as the Five Points (fig. 1). The cup was recovered from a privy deposit dating between 1850-1870. The privy is associated with a tenement housing Irish immigrant families and boarders at 472 Pearl Street. The image of Father Mathew and the accompanying symbols provide a unique insight into the social history of and relations between Irish Catholic immigrants and mainstream Americans. To the Irish immigrant community, this image reflects social relations within the Catholic community, perceptions of temperance, and various paths towards acceptance in American society.

The health experience of Irish people in a North West London 'community saved'

This paper describes the development of a 'community saved' among first generation Irish immigrants in London. A 'community saved' is defined by its containment of numerous personal relationships formed over time; it is 'densely knit' and 'bounded'. Within this paper links are described between the development and survival of this Irish immigrant community, with its emphasis upon both family ties and work as a means of enhancing social cohesion, and its members' lived health experience. Social theory in its most comprehensive form, as a 'tool' of social research which seeks to provide explanations of events in the real world, provides a unifying theoretical framework for the study. The development of 'social capital', or the growth of values such as trust and reciprocity that facilitate societal functioning and community life, provides the main unifying theme linking community life to health experience. Precisely how it does so may mean moving, at times, in and out of empirical data. It involves participants using their own words and their own phrases to describe their particular experience: an exposition beyond the scope of mere statistical measurement. Cette article offre un portrait d'une 'communauté sauvée' parmi des immigrés irlandais Londinien de la première génération. Une 'communuaté sauvée' se défine par son endiguement de plusiers rapports crées depuis longtemps. C'est une communuaté unie et bornée qui met en valeur les rapports familiales et le travail comme moyens d améliorer la cohésion sociale. L'article brosse un tableau des liens entre le développement et la survivance de cette colonie irlandaise, et ses expériences vis àvis de la santé. La théorie sociale, dans sa forme la plus compréhensive, c'est àdire comme un instrument de recherche sociale qui s'addresse à expliquer les événements dans la vie réelle, fournit ici un cadre théorique unifiant. Le développement du 'biens d'équipement' où la croissance des valeurs telles que la confiance et la réciprocité, valeurs facilitant le fonctionnement de la societé et la vie associative, fournit la thème qui unit la vie associative aux expériences salutaires.

The Treaty Split and the Paris Irish Race Convention, 1922

The Irish Race Convention, held in Paris at the end of January 1922, has received very little attention from historians of the period. Yet it was a notable event attended by delegates representing Irish immigrant communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Britain and South America. From Ireland came a pro-Treaty delegation led by Eoin Mac Neill, and an anti-Treaty delegation led by Eamon de Valera. There was an element of tragi-comedy in this rather volatile arrangement. Fortunately, both de Valera and Mac Neill soon realized that Paris was not the place to air domestic Irish political grievances. The unity of the Irish Race Convention was preserved. But not the unity of the nationalist movement which was subsequently broken by the seizure of the Four Courts and the Civil War.