Every single person in the United States came from somewhere else, except Native Americans, who were here first, full stop.

Using the Irish Potato Famine as the backbone, this episode connects forced migration, racial hierarchy, and modern immigration panic into one continuous story. From famine ships to “No Irish Need Apply,” from becoming “white” to forgetting what that cost, this episode dismantles the myth of the “real American” and exposes how every generation rewrites its own arrival story to justify cruelty toward the next.

Kinealy, Christine. This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52. Gill & Macmillan, 1994.

Ó Gráda, Cormac. Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory. Princeton University Press, 1999.

Mitchel, John. The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps). James McGlashan, 1861.

The Times (London). Various editorials on the Irish potato blight, 1846–1847. British Newspaper Archive.

Hickman, Mary J. “Racialized Boundaries: The Irish as an ‘Other’ in Britain and the United States.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 1998, pp. 288–312.

Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. Routledge, 1995.

Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Library of Congress. “Immigration and American Expansion, 1800–1900.”
www.loc.gov.

Irish Central. O’Dowd, Niall. “Was It Genocide? What the British Ruling Class Really Said About the Irish Famine.” IrishCentral, 19 Apr. 2023.

Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum. “Population Loss and Emigration.” Quinnipiac University.