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Small differences? The study of the Irish in the United States and Britain*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

David Noel Doyle
David Noel Doyle*
Affiliation:
Department of Modern History, University College, Dublin
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Extract

How small in fact were the differences between and within the Irish communities overseas, and between their cultures and work achievements and those of their host societies? The past decade has seen the arrival of fairly complete bibliographies of the Irish diaspora in the United States and in Britain, and substantial bibliographical essays on the Irish in Canada and in Australia. The pioneer volume of Hartigan and Hickman, compiled outside the academic grid and its resources, is welcome, intelligent and full of small surprises, despite some odd omissions (e.g. all but one of Denis Gwynn’s relevant titles). Yet, unlike Patrick Blessing, they could not rely on and collate existent bibliographies, as he could do with those of J. T. Ellis and Robert Trisco on American Catholic history (1982), Daniel Casey and Robert Rhodes on Irish-American fiction (1979), and W. C. Miller (1975) and Séamus Metress (1981) on the bibliography of Irish-America overall.

Type
Review Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 113 , May 1994 , pp. 114 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1994

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Footnotes

*

The Irish in America: a guide to the literature and manuscript collections. By Patrick J. Blessing. Pp 347. Washington: Catholic University of America Press. 1992. $49.95.

The History of the Irish in Britain: A Bibliography. Compiled by Maureen Hartigan; edited by Mary J. Hickman. Pp 85. London: Irish in Britain History Centre. 1986. £2.50.

References

1 Metress, Séamus P. and Baker, William M., ‘A bibliography of the history of the Irish in Canada’ in O’Driscoll, Robert and Reynolds, Lorna (eds), The untold story: the Irish in Canada (2 vols, Toronto, 1988), ii, 977–1001Google Scholar; O’Farrell, Patrick, The Irish in Australia (Kensington, N.S.W., 1987), pp 314-25.Google Scholar

2 Metress, Séamus, A regional guide to informational sources on the Irish in the United States and Canada, Vance Bibliographies: Public Administration Series, P 1841 (Monticello, III., 1986).Google Scholar

3 Tillson, Albert H. Jr, ‘The southern backcountry: a survey of current research’ in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, xcviii (1990), pp 387–422 Google Scholar, indicates Rodger Cunningham, Sally A. Eads, Paula Hathway Anderson-Green, Warren Hofstra, Patricia Givens Johnson, Rachel Klein, Robert D. Mitchell, Richard MacMaster, Norris Preyer, Albert H. Tillson, Jr, and Marilyn Westerkamp. There are others: Tillson does not cover Pennsylvania and points west.

4 E.g. Reid, Russell, ‘Church membership, consanguineous marriage and migration in a Scotch-Irish frontier population’ in Journal of Family History, xiii (1988), pp 397–414 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neville, Gwen K., ‘Kinfolks and the Covenant: ethnic community among southern Presbyterians’ in Bennett, John (ed.), The new ethnicity (Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, 1973) (St Paul, 1973), pp 258-74Google Scholar; Anderson-Green, Paula H., ‘The New River frontier settlement on the Virginia-North Carolina border, 1760–1820’ in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, lxxxvi (1978), pp 412-31.Google Scholar

5 These are briefly epitomised in the new introduction by Steve Ickringill to Green, E. R. R. (ed.), Essays in Scotch-Irish history (2nd ed., Belfast, 1992)Google Scholar, and more fully in Jones, Maldwyn, ‘The Scotch-Irish in British America’ in Bailyn, Bernard and Morgan, P. D. (eds), Strangers within the realm (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), pp 284–313 Google Scholar. A forthcoming symposium of twelve papers from these conferences is being edited by Harold T. Blethen and Curtis W. Wood of Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, for the University of Alabama Press. The ironist might smile that among the 465,000 academics listed in the American National Faculty Directory, Blessing and Blethen are but a few names apart in a work of 16,000 columns, while working away in cognate fields unmindful of each other.