Description

Ireland and Irish America

Between 1600 and 1929, perhaps seven million men and women left Ireland and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Drawing on over thirty years of research, in sources as disparate as emigrants’ letters and demographic data, Ireland and Irish America looks at Irish Catholics and Protestants, on both sides of the ocean. It recovers the experiences and opinions of ordinary Irish emigrants as varied as the Rev. James McGregor, who in 1718 led the first major settlement of Presbyterians from Ulster to the New World, to Mary Rush, a desperate refugee from the Great Famine in County Sligo, and to Tom Brick, an Irish-speaking Kerryman on the American prairie in the early 1900s. Above all, Ireland and Irish America offers a trenchant analysis of mass migration’s causes, its consequences, and its popular and political interpretations. In the process, it challenges the conventional ‘two traditions’ (Protestant versus Catholic) paradigm of Irish and Irish diasporan history, and it illuminates the hegemonic forces and relationships that governed the Irish and Irish-American worlds created.

‘In the past quarter century, no scholar has been more influential than Kerby Miller in exploring the connected histories of Ireland and the United States … [Ireland and Irish America] is a compelling testament to Miller’s outstanding scholarship and unmatched ability to bridge successfully the Irish and American ends of the transatlantic migration story’ — Malcolm Campbell, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies

Read sample pages of Ireland and Irish America here

Kerby A. Miller is Curators’ Professor of History at the University of Missouri. He is the author of several landmark studies of Irish and Irish-American history, including Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) and (with David N. Doyle, Bruce D. Boling, and Arnold Schrier) Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).