Irish Catholics in Canadian and American Historiography

Jana Berger

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Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject History - America, grade: A (1,3), York University (Graduate Programme in History...

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Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject History - America, grade: A (1,3), York University (Graduate Programme in History), course: Graduate Seminar, language: English, abstract: "Tir na-Og," the land of eternal youth, lying far out in the ocean, is a part of Irish mythology since the day the ancient legends were told for the first time. Judging from the numbers, the Irish as a people seem to have found this land on the North American continent. Between 1800 and 1920, the time frame for this paper, almost five million people left Ireland for the United States alone, while the 1871 Canadian census shows that about one quarter of all Canadians were of Irish ethnicity. Looking at the literature covering that particular period of time, it becomes clear that there are two ideas about the Irish in North America in circulation. The first one is that most Irish immigrants were Catholics, who had to leave Ireland because they were suppressed by an English, that is, Protestant government, and later on because of the Great Famine. They were poor, uneducated, and unskilled and had a tendency to drinking and violence. Once in North America, they went mostly to the United States, where they were a suppressed minority. They settled in the cities, where they lived in Irish "ghettos" and found jobs mostly as unskilled or semiskilled labourers. This idea is argued in history books that were published between the late 1930s and mid-1980s, and their authors are mostly American. Two names appear regularly: Lawrence McCaffrey and Patrick Blessing. The other idea about the Irish in North America goes like this: In most cases they left their island out of economic hardship, were either farmers or belonged to the working or lower middle class. The religious affiliation of the first to come was Protestant, they went to Canada, where they blended in with the rest of society. Later on, the Irish immigrants were mostly Catholics who went to the United States, where they partly made the ghetto-experience. Historians suggesting this approach to the Irish immigrants published from the early 1980s to the end of the 1990s, and are for the most part Canadian. And here also two names appear regularly: Mark McGowan and Donald Akenson. [...]