Irish-American Heritage Month

In Becoming American under Fire, Christian G. Samito provides a rich account of how African American and Irish American soldiers influenced the modern vision of national citizenship that developed during the Civil War era. As Samito makes clear, the experiences of African Americans and Irish Americans differed substantially -- and at times both groups even found themselves violently opposed -- but they had in common that they aspired to full citizenship and inclusion in the American polity. Both communities were key participants in the fight to expand the definition of citizenship that became enshrined in constitutional amendments and legislation that changed the nation.

Timothy J. Meagher fuses an overview of Irish American history with an analysis of historians' debates, an annotated bibliography, a chronology of critical events, and a glossary discussing crucial individuals, organizations, and dates. He addresses a range of key issues in Irish American history from the first Irish settlements in the seventeenth century through the famine years in the nineteenth century to the volatility of 1960s America and beyond. The result is a definitive guide to understanding the complexities and paradoxes that have defined the Irish American experience.

On the eve of the Civil War, the Irish were one of America's largest ethnic groups, and approximately 150,000 fought for the Union. Analyzing letters and diaries written by soldiers and civilians; military, church, and diplomatic records; and community newspapers, Susannah Ural Bruce significantly expands the story of Irish-American Catholics in the Civil War, and reveals a complex picture of those who fought for the Union.

In the century between the Napoleonic Wars and the Irish Civil War, more than seven million Irish men and women left their homeland to begin new lives abroad. While the majority settled in the United States, Irish emigrants dispersed across the globe, many of them finding their way to another "New World," Australia. "Ireland's New Worlds" is the first book to compare Irish immigrants in the United States and Australia. In a profound challenge to the national histories that frame most accounts of the Irish diaspora, Malcolm Campbell highlights the ways that economic, social, and cultural conditions shaped distinct experiences for Irish immigrants in each country, and sometimes in different parts of the same country.

This book is a collection of nine essays exploring the Irish-American experience in the New Jersey and New York metropolitan area, both historically and today. The essays place the local Irish-American experience in the wider context of immigration studies, assimilation, and historical theory. Using case studies, interviews, scholarly research in primary historical documents and theory, and first-hand experience, the authors delve into what it has meant, and means, to be Irish American in the New Jersey and New York area, projecting what this ethnic identity will signify in years to come.

A collection of 29 essays on the fascinating and turbulent history of the Irish in America Featuring 29 classic and original essays on the turbulent, vital, and fascinating story of the Irish in America. Few other immigrant peoples have exerted such pervasive influence, have left so deep an impression, have made their values and concerns so central to the destiny of their new country. In Making the Irish American, J.J. Lee and Marion R. Casey offer a feast of twenty-nine perspectives on the turbulent, vital, endlessly fascinating story of the Irish in America.

In The Shamrock and the Cross: Irish American Novelists Shape American Catholicism, Eileen P. Sullivan traces changes in nineteenth-century American Catholic culture through a study of Catholic popular literature. Analyzing more than thirty novels spanning the period from the 1830s to the 1870s, Sullivan elucidates the ways in which Irish immigration, which transformed the American Catholic population and its institutions, also changed what it meant to be a Catholic in America. Given the influence of the Irish in church institutions, the type of Catholicism they favored became the gold standard for all American Catholics, shaping their consciousness until well into the next century.

Sensational tales of true-life crime, the devastation of the Irish potato famine, the upheaval of the Civil War, and the turbulent emergence of the American labor movement are connected in a captivating exploration of the roots of the Molly Maguires. A secret society of peasant assassins in Ireland that re-emerged in Pennsylvania's hard-coal region, the Mollies organized strikes, murdered mine bosses, and fought the Civil War draft. Their shadowy twelve-year duel with all powerful coal companies marked the beginning of class warfare in America. Combining sweeping history with an intensely local focus, The Sons of Molly Maguire is the captivating story of when, where, how, and why the first of America's labor wars began.

Billy Collins is Distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He was appointed poet laureate of the United States for 2001-2003 and the poet laureate of New York State from 2004-2006. He is the author of eight collections of poetry including his latest, The Trouble with Poetry.

Maureen Waters began writing about the Bronx in the spirit of dinnseachas, Irish place lore, as a means of recuperating from the accidental death of her son, whose story frames her own. Finding her way through the disorienting 1960s, after a girlhood tutored by nuns and inspired by the Holy Ghost, she set out on a kind of spiritual journey to recover what was valuable and life-sustaining in the Irish Catholic experience left behind. Writing her memoir meant coming to terms with the powerful matriarchal voices that inspired both affection and immobilizing guilt. Ultimately, Crossing Highbridge is a tribute to her father, for whom storytelling was an art of healing.

The Banshees traces the feminist contributions of a wide range of Irish American women writers, from Mother Jones, Kate Chopin, and Margaret Mitchell to contemporary authors such as Gillian Flynn, Jennifer Egan, and Doris Kearns Goodwin. To illustrate the growth and significance of their writing, the book is organized chronologically by decade. Each chapter details the progress and setbacks of Irish American women during that period by revealing key themes in their novels and memoirs contextualized within a discussion of contemporary feminism, Catholicism, Irish American history, American politics, and society. The Banshees examines these writers' roles in protecting women's sovereignty, rights, and reputations.

Margaret Sargent is young and fearless, a deep thinker inspired by the bohemian energy that abounds in New York City in the years leading up to the Second World War. With careless abandon, she destroys her marriage and numerous love affairs as she moves through the social circles of artists and writers, playing at the fringes of political extremism. She is an enigma, often wanton and frivolous, but possessing intelligence and a razor-sharp wit, as well as a troubling core of inner darkness, self-doubt, and puzzling tendencies toward self-destruction. For Margaret, urban life in the 1930s is an ongoing adventure--ever-changing, always surprising, and deeply, profoundly unsatisfying.

The Sphere of Birds, Ciaran Berry's debut collection of poems, effortlessly moves back and forth between here and there, then and now, the personal and the historic, the modern and the mythic. Berry imagines the transatlantic journeys of John James Audubon and reveals his own heartfelt experience moving from his first house. Accessible, immediate, and visceral, The Sphere of Birds offers a musicality that is increasingly rare in contemporary poetry.