IRISH MIGRATION: READING LIST FOR COMPREHENSIVE EXAMS (KEVIN KENNY)
SECTION ONE: COMPARATIVE MIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT
I- Migration: Origins, Motivations, and Process
Connell, K.H., Irish Peasant Society: Four Historical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1968).
Connolly, Tracey, “Emigration from Ireland to Britain During the Second World
War,” in Bielenberg, ed., Irish Diaspora
Delaney, Enda and Donald M. MacRaild, eds, Irish Migration, Networks and Ethnic
Identities Since 1750. London: Routledge, 2007.
Donnelly, James S., Jr., The Irish Potato Famine (Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2001).
Fitzpatrick David. “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).
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).
Guinnane, Timothy The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural
Economy in Ireland, 1850-1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1997).
Harris, Ruth-Ann, The Nearest Place that Wasn't Ireland: Early Nineteenth-Century
Labor Migration (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1994).
Kennedy, Robert E. The Irish: Emigration, Marriage, and Fertility (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973)
Miller, Kerby A., Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Neal, Frank, Black ’47: Britain and the Famine Irish (London, 1998).
Scally, Robert, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration (New
York: 1995).
Ia- The Scots Irish (for comparative purposes)
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.
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.
Miller, Kerby A., Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North
America (New York, 1985), chapter 4, 5, and part of 6.
_______, “‘Scotch-Irish, Black Irish’ and ‘Real Irish: Emigrants and Identities in the
Old South,” in Bielenberg, ed., Irish Diaspora
II- The Irish in the United States (see also thematic studies below)
Akenson, Donald H. “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).
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_______, Being Had: Historians, Evidence, and the Irish in North America (Don
Mills, Ontario: P. D. Meany, 1985).
Campbell, Malcolm. Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the
United States and Australia, 1815-1922.
Burchell, Robert A. The San Francisco Irish, 1848-1880 (Manchester, England:
Manchester University Press, 1979).
Doyle, David Noel. “The Remaking of Irish America, 1845-80,” in W. E. Vaughan,
ed., A New History of Ireland, Vol. VI, Ireland under the Union, II, 18701921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
_______, Doyle, David Noel, “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.
Ernst, Robert Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1863 (1949; Syracuse, New
York: Syracuse University Press, 1994).
Handlin, Oscar, Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation (1941; New York:
Atheneum, 1976).
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), 6482.
Kenny, Kevin, The American Irish: A History (New York: Longman, 2000).
McNergney Vinyard, Jo Ellen The Irish on the Urban Frontier: Nineteenth-Century
Detroit, 1850-80 (New York: Arno Press, 1976).
Niehaus, Earl F. The Irish in New Orleans, 1800-1860 (1965; New York, 1976);
Potter, Golden Door
Miller, Kerby A. Miller, “Assimilation and Alienation: Irish Emigrants’ Responses to
Industrial America, 1871-1921,” in Drudy, ed., The Irish in America.
_______., “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)
_______ with Bruce D. Boling and David N. Doyle, “Emigrants and Exiles: Irish
Cultures and Irish Emigration to North America, 1790-1922,” Irish Historical
Studies, XXII (1980): 97-125.
Thernstrom, Stephan. The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American
Metropolis, 1860-1970 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1973).
IIa- Comparative Global Settlement
Bartlett, Thomas, “The Irish Soldier in India,” in Michael and Denis Holmes, eds.,
Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts (Dublin, 1997), pp.
12-28.
Bielenberg, Andy, ed., The Irish Diaspora (London: Longman, 2000)
Campbell, Malcolm “The Other Immigrants: Comparing the Irish in Australia and the
United States," Journal of American Ethnic History, 14 (Spring 1995): 3-22.
Fitzpatrick, David. “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).
O’Tuathaigh, M.A.G. “The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of
Integration,” Transactions of the Royal Irish Historical Society, 5th ser., 31
(1981): 149-73.
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Kenny, Kevin. “Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study,”
Journal of American History, 90 (June 2003): 134-62.
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SECTION TWO: THEMATIC STUDIES
III- Labor
Brundage, David, The Making of Western Radicalism: Denver's Organized Workers,
1878-1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Emmons, David M., The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining
Town, 1875-1925 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
Gitelman, Howard M., “No Irish Need Apply: Patterns of and Responses to Ethnic
Discrimination in the Labor Market,” Labor History, 14 (Winter 1973): 56-68.
Kenny, Kevin, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998).
Mitchell, Brian C., The Paddy Camps: The Irish of Lowell, 1821-61 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988).
Montgomery, David, “The Irish and the American Labor Movement,” in David Noel
Doyle and Owen Dudley Edwards, eds, America and Ireland, 1776-1976: The
American Identity and the Irish Connection, 1776-1976 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1980).
Way, Peter, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of the North American
Canals, 1780-1860 (Cambridge, UK, 1993).
_______, “Evil Humors and Ardent Spirits: The Rough Culture of Canal Construction
Laborers,” Journal of American History, 79 (March, 1993): 1397-1428.
Wilentz, Sean, Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of
American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1984).
_______, “Industrializing America and the Irish: Towards the New Departure,”
Labor History, 20 (1979): 579-595.
IV- Race and Racism
¾ America
Arnesen, Eric, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and
Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 3-32 (and the accompanying forum).
Eagan, Catherine M. “‘White,’ If ‘Not Quite’: Irish Whiteness in the NineteenthCentury Irish-American Novel,” in Kevin Kenny, ed., New Directions in IrishAmerican History, ed. Kevin Kenny. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2003: 140-156.
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): 143-177.
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, CT: 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).
Saxton, Alexander, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement
in California. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
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______, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in
Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990).
¾ Britain
Curtis, L. Perry, Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. ed.
(Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).
Foster, R. F., Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Anglo-Irish History (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).
V- Politics and Nativism
¾ America
Anbinder, Tyler. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics
of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Erie, Steven P., Rainbow’s End: Irish Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban
Machine Politics, 1840-1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988).
Gordon, Michael, The Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City in
1870-1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925
(New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1965).
O’Connor, Thomas, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston, 1995).
¾ Comparative
Neal, Frank, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience 1819-1914 (Manchester,
England: Manchester University Press, 1988).
Swift and Gilley, eds, The Irish in the Victorian City (essays by Gallagher on
Glasgow and Millward on Stockport).
Waller, Philip J., Democracy and Sectarianism: A Political and Social History
ofLiverpool, 1868-1939 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1981).
VI- Nationalism
¾ Irish-American
Brown, Thomas N., Irish American Nationalism, 1870-1890 (Philadelphia, 1966).
D’Arcy, William, The Fenian Movement in the United States (New York, 1971).
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).
Walsh, Victor, “A Fanatic Heart: The Cause of Irish-American Nationalism in
Pittsburgh During the Gilded Age,” Journal of Social History, 15 (1981), 187204.
Wilson, David A., United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early
Republic (Ithaca, 1998).
¾ Comparative
Belchem, John, “Nationalism, Republicanism and Exile: Irish Emigrants and the
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Revolutions of 1848,” Past and Present, 146 (February 1995): 103-135.
Newsinger, John, Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain (London, 1994).
Travers, Robert, The Phantom Fenians of New South Wales (Kenthurst, NSW:
Kangaroo Press, 1986).