Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928. By Timothy J. Meagher. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Pp. 523. $22.00.

Extract

Irish-Americans, by which we mean immigrants to the United States from Ireland, the descendants of those people, and perhaps some who found it convenient to assume an Irish identity even without any Irish ancestry, have a large and rich historiography. Like most mature historiographies this literature now has its models, its orthodoxies, and its gadflies. Many recent useful contributions to this literature have taken one of two approaches. One is to set the Irish in a comparative perspective, and think about how Irish-Americans differed from other overseas Irish groups; how Ireland differed from other relatively poor European economies in the nineteenth century; and how the Irish in the United States differed from other “ethnic” groups in the country. Studies taking this comparative approach have accomplished a great deal in undermining old myths and have at the same time sharpened the aspects of the Irish-American experience that were distinctive and require further study. Another approach has been to choose a particular Irish-American community and to study that community in as much detail as possible. This tactic has been especially effective in understanding how particular locations or circumstances affected Irish-American communities and has helped scholars of this group to be more careful about generalizations.