Famine Irish and the American Racial State

Famine Irish and the American Racial State PDF Author: Peter D. O'Neill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315393441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Accounts of Irish racialization in the United States have tended to stress Irish difference. Famine Irish and the American Racial State takes a different stance. This interdisciplinary, transnational work uses an array of cultural artifacts, including novels, plays, songs, cartoons, government reports, laws, sermons, memoirs, and how-to manuals, to make its case. It challenges the claim that the Irish "became white" in the United States, showing that the claim fails to take into full account the legal position of the Irish in the nineteenth-century US state – a state that deemed the Irish "white" upon arrival. The Irish thus not only fitted into the US racial state; they helped to form it. Till now, little heed has been paid to the state’s role in the Americanization of the Irish or to the Irish role in the development of US state institutions. Distinguishing American citizenship from American nationality, this volume journeys to California to analyze the means by which the Irish gained acceptance in both categories, at the expense of the Chinese. Along the way, it contests ideas that have taken hold within American studies. One is the notion that the Roman Catholic Church operated outside of the power structure of the nineteenth-century United States. On the contrary, Famine Irish and the American Racial State argues, the Irish-led corporate Catholic Church became deeply imbricated in US state structures. Its final chapter discusses a radical, transnational, Irish tradition that offers a glimpse at a postnational future.

Famine Irish and the American Racial State

Famine Irish and the American Racial State PDF Author: Peter D. O'Neill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315393441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book Here

Book Description
Accounts of Irish racialization in the United States have tended to stress Irish difference. Famine Irish and the American Racial State takes a different stance. This interdisciplinary, transnational work uses an array of cultural artifacts, including novels, plays, songs, cartoons, government reports, laws, sermons, memoirs, and how-to manuals, to make its case. It challenges the claim that the Irish "became white" in the United States, showing that the claim fails to take into full account the legal position of the Irish in the nineteenth-century US state – a state that deemed the Irish "white" upon arrival. The Irish thus not only fitted into the US racial state; they helped to form it. Till now, little heed has been paid to the state’s role in the Americanization of the Irish or to the Irish role in the development of US state institutions. Distinguishing American citizenship from American nationality, this volume journeys to California to analyze the means by which the Irish gained acceptance in both categories, at the expense of the Chinese. Along the way, it contests ideas that have taken hold within American studies. One is the notion that the Roman Catholic Church operated outside of the power structure of the nineteenth-century United States. On the contrary, Famine Irish and the American Racial State argues, the Irish-led corporate Catholic Church became deeply imbricated in US state structures. Its final chapter discusses a radical, transnational, Irish tradition that offers a glimpse at a postnational future.

How the Irish Became White

How the Irish Became White PDF Author: Noel Ignatiev
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135070695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
'...from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called ‘path breaking,’ ‘seminal,’ ‘essential,’ a ‘must read.’ How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.

The Famine Diaspora and Irish American Women's Writing

The Famine Diaspora and Irish American Women's Writing PDF Author: Marguérite Corporaal
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031407911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
The Famine Diaspora and Irish American Women’s Writing considers the works of eleven North American female authors who wrote for or descended from the Irish Famine generation: Anna Dorsey, Christine Faber, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mother Jones, Kate Kennedy, Margaret Dixon McDougall, Mary Meaney, Alice Nolan, Fanny Parnell, Mary Anne Sadlier, and Elizabeth Hely Walshe. This collection examines the ways the writings of these women contributed significantly to the construction of Irish North-American identities, and played a crucial role in the dissemination of Famine memories transgenerationally as well as transnationally. The included annotated excerpts from these women writers’ works and the accompanying essays by prominent international scholars offer insights on the sociopolitical position of the Irish in North America, their connections with the homeland, women’s activities in transnational (often Catholic) publishing networks and women writers’ mediation of Ireland’s cultural heritage. Furthermore, the volume illustrates the generic variety of Irish American women’s writing of the Famine generation, which comprises political treatises, novels, short stories and poetry, and bears witness to these female authors’ profound engagement with political and social issues, such as the conditions of the poor and woman’s vote.

The Routledge History of Irish America

The Routledge History of Irish America PDF Author: Cian T. McMahon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040047165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 886

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Book Description
This volume gathers over 40 world-class scholars to explore the dynamics that have shaped the Irish experience in America from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. From the early 1600s to the present, over 10 million Irish people emigrated to various points around the globe. Of them, more than six million settled in what we now call the United States of America. Some were emigrants, some were exiles, and some were refugees—but they all brought with them habits, ideas, and beliefs from Ireland, which played a role in shaping their new home. Organized chronologically, the chapters in this volume offer a cogent blend of historical perspectives from the pens of some of the world’s leading scholars. Each section explores multiple themes including gender, race, identity, class, work, religion, and politics. This book also offers essays that examine the literary and/or artistic production of each era. These studies investigate not only how Irish America saw itself or, in turn, was seen, but also how the historical moment influenced cultural representation. It demonstrates the ways in which Irish Americans have connected with other groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, and sets “Irish America” in the context of the global Irish diaspora. This book will be of value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as instructors and scholars interested in American History, Immigration History, Irish Studies, and Ethnic Studies more broadly.

Race, Politics, and Irish America

Race, Politics, and Irish America PDF Author: Mary M. Burke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192675842
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse, convey how the Irish racially transformed multiple times: in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America's frontiers and antebellum plantations, and along its eastern seaboard. This cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas examines the forcibly transported Irish, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian Ulster-Scots, and post-1845 Famine immigrants. Their racial transformations are indicated by the designations they acquired in the Americas: 'Redlegs,' 'Scots-Irish,' and 'black Irish.' In literature by Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Mitchell, Glasgow, and Yerby (an African-American author of Scots-Irish heritage), the Irish are both colluders and victims within America's racial structure. Depictions range from Irish encounters with Native and African Americans to competition within America's immigrant hierarchy between 'Saxon' Scots-Irish and 'Celtic' Irish Catholic. Irish-connected presidents feature, but attention to queer and multiracial authors, public women, beauty professionals, and performers complicates the 'Irish whitening' narrative. Thus, 'Irish Princess' Grace Kelly's globally-broadcast ascent to royalty paves the way for 'America's royals,' the Kennedys. The presidencies of the Scots-Irish Jackson and Catholic-Irish Kennedy signalled their respective cohorts' assimilation. Since Gothic literature particularly expresses the complicity that attaining power ('whiteness') entails, subgenres named 'Scots-Irish Gothic' and 'Kennedy Gothic' are identified: in Gothic by Brown, Poe, James, Faulkner, and Welty, the violence of the colonial Irish motherland is visited upon marginalized Americans, including, sometimes, other Irish groupings. History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race.

The History of the Irish Famine

The History of the Irish Famine PDF Author: Jason King
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315513676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
The Great Irish Famine remains one of the most lethal famines in modern world history and a watershed moment in the development of modern Ireland – socially, politically, demographically and culturally. In the space of only four years, Ireland lost twenty-five per cent of its population as a consequence of starvation, disease and large-scale emigration. Certain aspects of the Famine remain contested and controversial, for example the issue of the British government’s culpability, proselytism, and the reception of emigrants. However, recent historiographical focus on this famine has overshadowed the impact of other periods of subsistence crisis, both before 1845 and after 1852. This volume breaks new ground in bringing together foundational narratives of one of Europe and North America’s first refugee crises — making visible their impact in shaping perceptions, public opinion, and patterns of memorialization of Irish forced migration. It documents eyewitness impressions of suffering Irish emigrants, and raises questions about what literary conventions, mnemonic motifs, and popular images can be found in eyewitness accounts, press coverage, and foundational narratives of Famine Irish forced migration. These primary sources provide a model for understanding how representations of forced migration shape public opinion and policy.

Private property and the fear of social chaos

Private property and the fear of social chaos PDF Author: Aidan Beatty
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526165694
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
This is a book about what people imagine it means to live in a world where private property is dominant, and their fears – and sometimes hopes – about living in a future world where private property has disappeared. In the propertied imagination, private property is a fragile thing, an institution beset by terrifying enemies and racialised and gendered mobs: Levellers and Diggers, socialists and anarchists, fervent religious radicals, abolitionists, feminists, and haughty welfare-state bureaucrats. The history of private property is the history of a recurring nightmare that one or another of these groups would storm the castle and take control. That threatened social chaos is the central unifying story of this book. Private property and the fear of social chaos starts by charting the thinkers who laid the foundations for how we understand private property, including Locke, Burke, Marx and Engels. The book looks at how their ideas have been put into practice in ways that continue to shape the modern world, from Harry Truman’s housing policies and the anti-abolitionist George Fitzhugh to Margaret Thatcher and Elon Musk. Arguing that the spectre of ‘the mob’ has been intimately interconnected with the idea of private property throughout capitalist modernity, the book ambitiously narrates this history from the early colonisation of the Americas to Silicon Valley, and the future of human colonisation in space.

Politics, Culture, and the Irish American Press

Politics, Culture, and the Irish American Press PDF Author: Debra Reddin van Tuyll
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815655045
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
From the Revolutionary War forward, Irish immigrants have contributed significantly to the construction of the American Republic. Scholars have documented their experiences and explored their social, political, and cultural lives in countless books. Offering a fresh perspective, this volume traces the rich history of the Irish American diaspora press, uncovering the ways in which a lively print culture forged significant cultural, political, and even economic bonds between the Irish living in America and the Irish living in Ireland. As the only mass medium prior to the advent of radio, newspapers served to foster a sense of identity and a means of acculturation for those seeking to establish themselves in the land of opportunity. Irish American newspapers provided information about what was happening back home in Ireland as well as news about the events that were occurring within the local migrant community. They framed national events through Irish American eyes and explained the significance of what was happening to newly arrived immigrants who were unfamiliar with American history or culture. They also played a central role in the social life of Irish migrants and provided the comfort that came from knowing that, though they may have been far from home, they were not alone. Taking a long view through the prism of individual newspapers, editors, and journalists, the authors in this volume examine the emergence of the Irish American diaspora press and its profound contribution to the lives of Irish Americans over the course of the last two centuries.

Contact Zones

Contact Zones PDF Author: Justin Carville
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462702527
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Since the mid-nineteenth century photography has played a central role in cultural encounters within and between migrant communities in the United States. Migrant histories have been mediated through the photographic image, and the cultural practices of photography have themselves been transformed as migrant communities mobilise the photographic image to navigate experiences of cultural dislocation and the forging of new identities. Exploring photographic images and the cultural practices of photography as ‘contact zones’ through which cultural exchange and transformation takes place, this volume addresses the role of photography in migrant histories in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Taking as its focal point photography’s role in shaping migrant experiences of cultural transformation, and how migrant experiences have re-configured culturally differentiated practices of photography, case studies on migration from Europe, Central America, and North America position photography as entwined with cultural histories of migration and cultural transformation in the United States.

Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies

Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies PDF Author: Winfried Fluck
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1611681901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
What is the state of American studies in the twenty-first century?