Irish Immigration

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.

It started in 1845 and lasted six years. Before it was over, more than one million men, women, and children starved to death and another million fled the country. Measured in terms of mortality, the Great Irish Potato Famine was one of the worst disasters in the 19th century-it claimed twice as many lives as the American Civil War. A perfect storm of bacterial infection, political greed, and religious intolerance sparked this catastrophe.

Now everyone will know the truth. Without the Irish, the American frontier may never have been tamed.Here is the full story of the Irish immigrants and their decedents, whose hard work helped make the West what it is today. A fascinating and entertaining look at the history of the American West, this book will surprise many and make every Irish American proud.

In 1845, a fungus began to destroy Ireland’s potato crop, triggering a famine that would kill one million Irish men, women, and children—and drive over one million more to flee for America. Ten years later, the United States had been transformed by this stupendous migration, nowhere more than New York: by 1855, roughly a third of all adults living in Manhattan were immigrants who had escaped the hunger in Ireland.

From 1845 to 1852, the Great Hunger, also referred to as the "Potato Famine", was a period of a lot of starvation and illness in Ireland. The period was known in Irish at the time as a "Drochshaol"—loosely translated as "the hard days", or actually "the bad life"—with the most badly affected districts in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was popular. The year 1847, at times called "Black '47", was the absolute worst year of the period. Around one million people died, and over a million left the nation throughout the Great Famine.

From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.

"A sweeping tale of survival, rebellion, and destiny—from the starving fields of Ireland to the halls of power in America and the battlefields of revolution." Ireland, 1845—The Great Famine has begun. The O’Donaghue family, once proud tenant farmers, are torn apart as hunger, oppression, and betrayal drive them in different directions. Christopher, the eldest, escapes to New York, where he rises through the ranks of Tammany Hall, navigating the ruthless world of Irish-American politics. Seamus, consumed by the fight for Irish independence, becomes a revolutionary, orchestrating ...

America has always been and will continue to be a country of immigrants. In The Broken Welcome Mat, immigration expert Helen Raleigh weaves in her own experiences as a Chinese immigrant with U.S. history to create a vivid picture of the evolution of America's immigration policies and the challenges we face today. Intelligent, sensible, and witty, The Broken Welcome Mat provides a road map for improving America's immigration system and creating a better, more united country for generations to come.

Jay Dolan of Notre Dame University is one of America’s most acclaimed scholars of immigration and ethnic history. In The Irish Americans, he caps his decades of writing and teaching with this magisterial history of the Irish experience in the United States. Although more than 30 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, no other general account of Irish American history has been published since the 1960s. Dolan draws on his own original research and much other recent scholarship to weave an insightful, colorful narrative.

WATER AND ICE is both an exciting, newly-discovered sea story, and a detailed reference book that belongs in the book-collection of anyone interested in maritime or immigration history. Arthur Mattson’s original research into the maritime history of Long Island and the Port of New York in the 1830s tells of: • Two dramatic shipwrecks and rescue attempts on the South Shore of Long Island. • A mass grave in the village of Lynbrook, containing 139 victims. • Merchants, sailors, passengers, and tall ships in the Age of Sail. • The brave men and women (and the cowards) involved in the ...

Unintended Consequences reveals how America’s door closed on legal Irish immigration in the 1960s, and how America’s Irish mounted a counterattack when nation-changing political forces were sweeping the country during the era of civil rights, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War. This book looks at the full historical background to Irish migration across the Atlantic, how it helped shape the young republic, and how the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 brought a near total halt to this westward flow. Nevertheless, the Irish would not be denied and continued to make the ...

Everyone has experienced that fresh baked cookie smell and thought of some cherished family member or friend. The author’s goal in writing about ethnic food is to have the reader experience the same thing. For the author the smell of ethnic dishes like Kapusta (cabbage) Soup or Kugela(is) (potato pudding) isn’t the smell of cabbage or potatoes that is memorable but lunches at his grandmother’s house with his family, a welcome break from work at the family business next door. One problem in accomplishing this goal is that the extinction of ethnic foods in this country has been ongoing ...

Thomas Keneally, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler’s List, is universally praised for crafting smooth narratives from authentic historical events. With The Great Shame, he turns his insightful eye toward the Irish struggle through the 19h century. In sharp contrast to much of Europe, Ireland was a terrible place to be during the 1800s. Many of the nation’s finest people set sail for America and Canada.

Author Stephen Birmingham, who chronicled the rise of Jewish immigrants to extraordinary wealth and success in Our Crowd, now turns his attention to the Irish. Real Lace tells the colorful and fascinating true stories of America’s most renowned Irish-Catholic families. Scions of courageous, driven, and resilient men and women who escaped starvation during Ireland’s terrible potato famine in the mid-19th century, they battled their way out of the slums of Boston and New York, overcoming prejudice and poverty to achieve great wealth, fame, and political power.

A flip of a switch, a blink of an eye… death can come that quickly. As mortals, we all wish for that to be our case, blissfully devoid of our own suffering or the suffering of others who will painfully watch our final days. Death by electrocution is usually quick, but not necessarily painless. The muscles of the body contract in wracking spasms and control of bodily functions is lost. The smell of singed flesh and burning hair permeate the room – certainly unpleasant for those the deceased left behind. In the United States, the process of electrification took several decades. Its ...

Not every immigrant sailed willingly to America... Ivy O’Neill’s idyllic childhood ends in disaster in 1690 when red-coated soldiers cross the Celtic Sea to invade Ireland. English soldiers attack and burn her family home, and her baby brother is killed in the raid. The family flees their home and ends up living in an abandoned house. An unscrupulous English ship captain kidnaps Ivy and her brother Sean and takes them to Maryland colony in America, where they are sold into indentured servitude. Ivy must call upon all her wits and strength just to survive, first the perilous sea voyage ...

On December 7th, 1955, Kitty McInerney lay dying in a New York hospital bed. The 47-year-old Irish immigrant, suffering from severe toxemia, was preparing for an emergency c-section to give birth to her 17th child. As a Catholic priest performed her last rites, Kitty succumbed to a rare moment of quiet reflection.