American Immigration & Ethnicity, the American Irish, and Irish Migration
Kevin Kenny
General Studies and Surveys
Bodnar, John E. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America.
Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985.
Conzen, Kathleen, David Gerber, et al, “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from
the U.S.A.,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (1992): 3-39.
Foner, Nancy. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Gerstle, Gary. "Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans" Journal of American
History 84, No. 2 (September 1997): 524-558.
Handlin, Oscar. Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study of Acculturation. Rev. ed.
Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959. Reprint, New York:
Atheneum, 1976.
Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1951.
Hansen, Marcus. The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1940.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish,
and Jewish Immigrants in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002.
Kazal, Russell. “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall and Reappraisal of a Concept in
American Ethnic History.” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 437-471.
Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. New York: Longman, 2000.
Kenny, Kevin. “Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study,” Journal of
American History, 90 (June 2003): 134-62.
Kenny, Kevin, ed. Ireland and the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004. Chs.4-5.
Kettner, James H. The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1978.
Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Sánchez, George. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano
Los Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Ueda, Reed. Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History. Boston: Bedford Books of St.
Martin’s Press, 1994.
Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia, ed. Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and
Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Labor
Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society
and Politics in the Age of the Civil War. New York, 1990.
Brundage, David. The Making of Western Radicalism: Denver's Organized Workers,
1878-1905. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Doyle, David Noel. “The Irish and American Labour, 1880-1920," Saothar: Journal of
the Irish Labour History Society, 1 (1975), 43-44;
Emmons, David M. The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town,
1875-1925. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Foner, Eric. “Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League in
Irish-American.” In Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of Civil War. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980.
Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
Way, Peter. Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of the North American Canals,
1780-1860. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
______. “Evil Humors and Ardent Spirits: The Rough Culture of Canal Construction
Laborers.” Journal of American History, 79 (March 1993), 1397-1428.
Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working
Class, 1788-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Women and Gender
Diner, Hasia. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth
Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1983.
Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in
Lowell Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
Ewen, Elizabeth, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the
Lower East Side, 1890-1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985.
Gabaccia, Donna. From the Other Side: Women, Gender, & Immigrant Life in the U.S.
1820-1990. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Harris, Ruth-Ann. “‘Come all You Courageously’: Irish Women in America Write
Home.” In Kevin Kenny, ed., New Directions in Irish-American History. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Hotten-Somers, Diane. “Relinquishing and Reclaiming Independence: Irish Domestic
Servants, American Middle-Class Mistresses, and Assimilation, 1850-1920.” In Kevin
Kenny, ed., New Directions in Irish-American History. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Hoy, Suellen. “The Journey Out: The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious
Women to the United States, 1812-1914,” Journal of Women’s History, 6 and 7
(Winter/Spring 1995), 64-98.
Nolan, Janet. Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920.
Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989.
Miller, Kerby A. with David N. Doyle and Patricia Kelleher. “’For Love and Liberty:
Irish Women, Migration and Domesticity in Ireland and America, 1815-1920,” in
O’Sullivan, ed., Irish World Wide. Vol. IV.
Nativism, Race, and Racism
Anbinder, Tyler. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-Nothings and the Politics of
the 1850s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Arnesen, Eric. “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and
Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 3-32 (and the accompanying forum).
Barrett, James, and David Roediger. “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the ‘new
Immigrant Working Class. Journal of American Ethnic History 16 (1997): 3-42.
Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in
American History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Curtis, L. Perry, Jr. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Rev. ed.
Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.
Daniels, Roger. Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New York:
Hill & Wang, 1993.
Eagan, Catherine M. “‘White,’ If ‘Not Quite’: Irish Whiteness in the Nineteenth Century
Irish-American Novel.” In Kevin Kenny, ed., New Directions in Irish-American History.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Fields, Barbara J. “Ideology and Race in American History.” In J. Morgan Kousser and
James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982.
Foster, R. F. Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Anglo-Irish History. London: Allen
Lane, 1993.
Gilley, Sheridan. “English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780-1900.” In Colin
Holmes, ed., Immigrants and Minorities in British Society. London and Boston: Allen &
Unwin, 1978.
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New
York: Atheneum Publishers, 1965.
Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the
Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.,: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Knobel, Dale T. Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum
America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1986.
Kolchin, Peter. “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of
American History, 89 (June 2002): 154-73.
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (New York, 1991).
Sanchez, George J. “Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies,” Journal
of American Ethnic History 18 (1999): 66-84
Nationalism
Brown, Thomas N. Irish American Nationalism, 1870-1890. Philadelphia, 1966.
Doorley, Michael. Irish-American Diaspora Nationalism: The Friends of Irish Freedom,
1916-1935. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005.
Foner, Eric. “Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League and
Irish America,” in Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. New
York, 1980.
Golway, Terry. Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America’s Fight for Ireland’s Freedom.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Walsh, Victor. “A Fanatic Heart: The Cause of Irish-American Nationalism in Pittsburgh
During the Gilded Age,” Journal of Social History, 15 (1981), 187-204.
Wilson, David A. United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early
Republic. Ithaca, 1998.
Asian Americans
Azuma, Eiichiro. Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in
Japanese America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Chan, Sucheng. Asian-Americans: An Interpretive History. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
Daniels, Roger. Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New
York: Hill & Wang, 1993.
Ichioka, Yuji. The Issei: The World of the First-Generation Japanese Immigrants,
1885-1924. New York: Free Press, 1988.
Lee, Erika. At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era,
1882-1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Murray, Alice Yang. What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.
Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in
California. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass
Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990).
Takaki, Ronald. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1989.
Irish Migration
1. migration: origins, motivation, process
Delaney, Enda. Irish Emigration Since 1921, Studies in Irish Economic and Social
History, No. 8. Dundalk, Ireland: The Economic and Social History Society of Ireland,
2002.
Fitzpatrick David. Irish Emigration, 1801-1921. Studies in Irish Economic and Social
History, No. 1.Dundalk, Ireland: The Economic and Social History Society of Ireland,
1984.
_______. “Emigration, 1801-70,” in W.E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, Vol.
V, Ireland Under the Union, I, 1801-70. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
_______. “Emigration, 1871-1921,” in W. E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland,
Vol. VI, Ireland under the Union, II, 1870-1921. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Guinnane, Timothy. The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural
Economy in Ireland, 1850-1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
2. the Scots Irish
Cullen, Louis M. “The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in
Nicholas Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move: Studies in European Migration,
1500-1800. Oxford, 1994, pp. 113-49.
Dickson, R. J.. Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718-1775 (London, 1966).
Economy in Ireland, 1850-1914. Princeton, NJ: 1997.
Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish,
and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2001.
Jones, Maldwyn A. “The Scotch-Irish in British America,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip
D. Morgan, eds., Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British
Empire. Chapel Hill, NC, 1991.
Leyburn, James G. The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 1962..
3. the famine migration
Donnelly, James S., Jr. The Irish Potato Famine. Stroud, Gloucestershire: 2001.
Gallman, J. Matthew. Receiving Erin’s Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish
Famine Migration, 1845-1855. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
2000.
Gray, Peter. The Irish Famine. London, 1995.
MacDonagh, Oliver. “The Irish Famine Emigration to the United States,” Perspectives in
American History, X (1976): 357-446.
Neal, Frank, Black ’47: Britain and the Famine Irish. London, 1998.
Scally, Robert. The End of Hidden Ireland. New York: 1995.
4. the Irish in Britain
Bielenberg, Andy, ed.. The Irish Diaspora. London: Longman, 2000. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, and 17.
Davis, Graham. The Irish in Britain, 1815-1914. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1991.
Fitzpatrick, David. “‘A Peculiar Tramping People’: The Irish in Britain, 1801-70.” In
W.E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, Vol. V, Ireland Under the Union, I,
1801-70. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
_______. “The Irish in Britain, 1871-1921.” In W. E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of
Ireland, Vol. VI, Ireland under the Union, II, 1870-1921. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996.
MacRaild, Donald M. Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750-1922. London, 1999.
_______. The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Immigrants in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries. Dublin, 2000.
5. the Irish in the United States
Akenson, Donald H. “An Agnostic View of the Historiography of the Irish Americans,”
Labour/Le Travail, 14 (Fall 1984): 123-59.
_______. “The Historiography of the Irish in the United States of America.” In Patrick
O’Sullivan, ed., The Irish World Wide. History, Heritage, Identity. Vol. II. The Irish in
the New Communities. Leicester, England, 1992.
Doyle, David Noel. “The Irish in North America, 1776-1845.” In W.E. Vaughan, ed., A
New History of Ireland, Vol. V, Ireland Under the Union, I, 1801-70 Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989.
_______. “The Remaking of Irish America, 1845-80.” In W. E. Vaughan, ed., A New
History of Ireland, Vol. VI, Ireland under the Union, II, 1870-1921. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996.
_______. “The Irish as Urban Pioneers in the United States, 1850-1870,” Journal of
American Ethnic History, 10 (Fall 1990-Winter 1991): 36-53, 127-28.
Hout, Michael and Joshua R. Goldstein. “How 4.5 million Irish immigrants became 40
million Irish Americans: Demographic and Subjective Aspects of the Ethnic
Composition,” American Sociological Review, 59 (February 1994), 64-82.
Miller, Kerby A. “Class, Culture, and Immigrant Group Identity in the United States: The
Case of Irish-American Ethnicity,” in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed., Immigration
Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990).