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Book Review
| Black Powder, White Lace: The du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. By Margaret M. Mulrooney. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2002. xiv, 296 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 1-58465-273-X. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 1-58465-274-8.)
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| A deep appreciation of the social and cultural diversity of Irish immigrants in industrial America has been one of the hallmarks of recent work in Irish American history. No longer is the Catholic famine migration of the 1840s and 1850s from rural Ireland to the large cities of the eastern seaboard seen as typical of Irish migration as a whole. Historians have lately been much more sensitive to the ways region of origin, gender, religion, class, and region of settlement shaped the acculturation process. In this thoroughly researched and well-written study of the Irish American community that took shape around the E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company's black powder yards in northern Delaware over the course of the nineteenth century, Margaret M. Mulrooney makes a substantial contribution to this trend. Black Powder, White Lace carefully demonstrates the myriad ways the experiences of the du Pont Irish differed from the Irish American experience in other places. As a result the book will be of great interest to specialists in the field. |
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