Texts and textures of Irish America (original) (raw)

2015, Irish Studies Review

published pioneering works 1 that moved beyond the ethno-pietistic interpretations that had characterised earlier works on the Irish in America, such as James Bernard Cullen's account of the Irish in Boston and the publications of the New York based American Irish Historical Society. The pioneering studies of the 1960s and 1970s authors were primarily political; they concentrated on the rise of Catholic Irish Americans in urban politics and the supportive roles that Irish American activists played in advancing Ireland's national cause in the latter half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. 2 At that time, considerable attention was directed also to the dominance of the Irish within the American Catholic Church and especially its monopoly of the American Catholic hierarchy. The perception of Irish America that emerged from the aforementioned studies was one of a constituency that was primarily urban in location, working class in values, Catholic in religion, Democratic in political party affiliation, and devoted to the cause of Irish independence. To a great extent, this was a homogenised view of Irish America, which, although it is generally recognised as still valid today, tended to occlude a cohort of Irish Americans that expressed different self-identities and underwent different experiences than those perceived to be the ones who qualified for the label of "Irish American". Building on the foundation that those works from the 1960s and 1970s established, over the past thirty years a new generation of scholars has shown that Irish American identity and experiences, influenced greatly by factors such as class, gender, religious affiliation, and period of immigration, were more complex and varied than was previously proposed. Many of the Irish who emigrated before the Great Famine, for instance, claimed different allegiances than those who came during and after it. Also significant were the provinces where immigrants had resided before they left Ireland; most Catholics, for instance, hailed from Leinster, Connaught and Munster, whereas most Presbyterians came from Ulster. These realities made a difference in terms of post-immigration experiences; so, too, did settlement communities in America; Boston's Irish were not the same as Butte's; likewise, Charleston's immigrants differed from San Francisco's, etc. This issue of Irish Studies Review had its genesis in two sessions offered by the New England Conference for Irish Studies at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, in the autumn of 2012. Suggesting considerable deviation on previous understandings of Irish q 2015 Taylor & Francis