Showing results for "Irish English" in United States

When the Continental Congress decided to declare independence from the British Empire in 1776, 10 percent of the population of their fledgling country were from Ireland. By 1790, close to 500,000 Irish citizens had immigrated to America. They were very active in the American Revolution, both on the battlefields and off, yet their stories are not well known. The important contributions of the Irish on military, political, and economic levels have been long overlooked and ignored by generations of historians.

The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country–a land of opportunity–they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book–the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians–tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors.

Hard Neighbors follows the people who came to be known as Scotch-Irish and traces their relations with Native Americans, examines their experiences as marginalized people, and demonstrates their roles as protective and disruptive forces on the edge of colonialism. The Scotch-Irish fought Indian wars and shaped the frontier, and their experiences living near and fighting against Indians shaped their identity and their attitudes towards government. They influenced national attitudes and policies, and they transformed Indian people into racial others as they transformed themselves into Americans.

Author Stephen Birmingham, who chronicled the rise of Jewish immigrants to extraordinary wealth and success in Our Crowd, now turns his attention to the Irish. Real Lace tells the colorful and fascinating true stories of America’s most renowned Irish-Catholic families. Scions of courageous, driven, and resilient men and women who escaped starvation during Ireland’s terrible potato famine in the mid-19th century, they battled their way out of the slums of Boston and New York, overcoming prejudice and poverty to achieve great wealth, fame, and political power.

Jay Dolan of Notre Dame University is one of America’s most acclaimed scholars of immigration and ethnic history. In The Irish Americans, he caps his decades of writing and teaching with this magisterial history of the Irish experience in the United States. Although more than 30 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, no other general account of Irish American history has been published since the 1960s. Dolan draws on his own original research and much other recent scholarship to weave an insightful, colorful narrative.

Published in 1791, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man defended the French Revolution’s values of freedom, equality, and brotherhood. He argued that a government based on justice ought to support mankind’s civil rights relating to security and protection, as well as the natural rights to life, liberty, and freedom of conscience. He also proposed plans for universal education, pensions, poverty relief, and social welfare in this classic work that was widely read across the West.

The Irish played a huge role in the American Revolution, not just on the battlefield but also in the field hospitals and in the framing of the Declaration of Independence. Niall O'Dowd, author of Lincoln and the Irish and A New Ireland, takes listeners on a journey into the unexplored contributions of the Irish in the American Revolution and behind the scenes of the relationships of some of those men and women with the first president of the United States.

This anthology of popular American history presents the stories of nine incredible Irish immigrants as written by nine contemporary Irish-Americans. More than one in 10 Americans claims Irish ancestry and, with its celebrity contributors, Nine Irish Lives will have strong appeal for those listeners. It is also, though, a timely portrait of shared humanity. These are stories about immigrants - and in the tales of revolutionaries and visionaries, caretakers and unsung heroes, Nine Irish Lives reminds us of the values and the people that have shaped America.

It's men like Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone who gave Hell's Kitchen its name. In the mid-1970s, these two longtime friends take the reins of New York's Irish mob, using brute force to give it hitherto unthinkable power. Jimmy, a charismatic sociopath, is the leader. Mickey, whose memories of Vietnam torture him daily, is his enforcer. Together they make brutality their trademark, butchering bodies or hurling them out the window.