Book Review

Canada and the United States

Linda Dowling Almeida. Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945–1995. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 211. $35.00.

Both Timothy Meagher's and Linda Dowling Almeida's books are important contributions to the growing literature that places the Irish-American experience in the broader contexts of immigration and ethnic history. Although Meagher focuses on nineteenth-century immigrants and Almeida concentrates on the postwar "New Irish" experience, both offer fresh insights into the processes of Irish-American identity formation.	1
Arguably one of the most important case studies since Oscar Handlin's Boston's Immigrants, 1790–1865: A Study in Acculturation (1940), Meagher's book focuses on the city of Worcester from the 1880s through the 1920s. Theoretically, this book is notable for masterfully bringing to bear generational and sociological models of immigrant assimilation and ethnic group formation to illuminate the concrete historical experience of the Irish in a middling but representative Massachusetts city.	2
Drawing particularly on Kerby Miller's seminal Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1985), Meagher begins by tracing "three waves of green": the trickle of pre-Famine Irish immigrants, the Famine-era diaspora (1845–1870), and post-Famine migrants (1870–1900). The Great Famine tragically punctuated the prolonged modernization process that gradually drew Ireland's agrarian economy into the orbit of England's global market and unevenly transformed its rural society. Before the Famine, sons with no farm to inherit and daughters with no heir to marry left the land to seek new lives in Irish cities or, more often, overseas. The Famine generation was the product of a still predominately traditional peasant world that was only beginning to change under the impact of Daniel O'Connell's successful campaign against the Penal Laws as well as campaigns to promote literacy. The later, post-Famine immigrants also were mostly unskilled but more likely to marry younger and less likely to speak Gaelic. They were schooled politically by successive post-Civil War Irish nationalist movements: the Fenians, Land Lea-guers, and "Home Rule" partisans. Yet despite differences, both Famine and post-Famine immigrants were communally oriented and shared an abiding sense of emigration as "exile," of being permanently forced out of their home country (to which few Irish, unlike many other European immigrant groups, returned in the nineteenth century).	3
The second generation—or first American-born generation—did not constitute a majority of Irish adults in Worcester until after 1900. They sought economic mobility by delaying both marriage and children. In increasing numbers, they attended high school or even college and sought white-collar employment and better housing on the urban periphery. Intensely proud to be American, they abandoned Irish folk pastimes for the emerging mass American culture.	. . .