| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Mary C. Kelly. The Shamrock and the Lily: The New York Irish and the Creation of a Transatlantic Identity, 1845–1921. New York: Peter Lang. 2005. Pp. xvi, 262. $29.95.
Mary C. Kelly's study of what she terms the creation of "a transatlantic identity" adds much to the broadening study of the Irish American experience in the post-Famine decades. Her central thesis challenges that of other historians who view the formation of Irish American identity as a consequence of the often embittering Irish immigrant experience in the unfamiliar, alien environment of urban America. Kelly suggests that Ireland was not just a place from which the Irish escaped but that the Irish transported and transplanted social, cultural, and political beliefs and practices to the new world. These products of the ancestral homeland, when fused with the New York identity, gave rise to a "dual-culture genesis" and the basis of a new nineteenth-century Atlantic world.	1
Focusing on the city of New York, "one of the most prominent of the 'untypical' cities," Kelly's study builds upon the growing body of regional and local stories that make up the Irish immigrant experience, most particularly upon the exemplary The New York Irish (1996), edited by Timothy J. Meagher and Ronald H. Bayor. She stresses, however, that the chapters she presents do not constitute "local history" per se. While it is the formation of the New York Irish character that is explored through the lenses of gender, religion, the arts, and politics, this character reflects a confluence of new and old world identities and a complex culture that echoes the settlement process more generally. The book is nonetheless replete with New York characters, street names, and institutions that reflect its vibrant cosmopolitanism and provide a specific backdrop for this particular settlement.	. . .

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