Not available to order
Publication date:
18 November 2013Length of book:
260 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442226081
Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish-American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory offers a new, concise interpretation of the history of the Irish in America. Author and distinguished professor Mary Kelly’s book is the first synthesized volume to track Ireland’s Great Famine within America’s immigrant history, and to consider the impact of the Famine on Irish ethnic identity between the mid-1800s and the end of the twentieth century. Moving beyond traditional emphases on Irish-American cornerstones such as church, party, and education, the book maps the Famine’s legacy over a century and a half of settlement and assimilation. This is the first attempt to contextualize a painful memory that has endured fitfully, and unquestionably, throughout Irish-American historical experience.
Although the history of the Great Irish Famine itself may be familiar to scholars, research on how the Famine was remembered, misremembered, and forgotten has barely begun. In this pioneering and wide-ranging book, Mary Kelly makes a significant contribution to this project. Drawing on the insights of contemporary memory studies, as well as on her own deep knowledge of Irish American history, Kelly provides a roadmap to the complicated process by which the memory of the Famine shaped what it meant to be Irish in the United States.