Irish America
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:11th Nov '99
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Few writers on the Irish in America have looked beyond the nineteenth-century ethnic enclaves of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago, or have asked how the notion of an Irish-American ethnic identity in contemporary America can be reconciled with five, six, or seven generations of intermarriage and assimilation over the last century and a half. This study, based on interviews with 500 people of Irish ancestry in Albany, New York, aims to discover in what senses and in what degrees the present-day descendants of nineteenth-century Irish immigrants possess distinctive social practices and ways of seeing the world, and raises questions about the social conditions in which ideas of Irishness have been created and re-created.
This is a refreshingly intriguing book with no trace of misty-eyed self-indulgence about the sea-divided Gael. * Irish Review 27 *
Irish America asks whether people who identify themselves as Irish-Americans have distinctive ways of behaving or thinking, five, six or seven generations down from the period of heaviest immigration around the time of the Famine. * Ian Jackman, London Review of Books, September 7th 2000 *
Byron believes that one effect of multiculturalism has been to force people to choose an ethnie - a politically and socially divisive practice. * Ian Jackman, London Review of Books, September 7th 2000 *
What a tonic this excellent book is for serious and non-partisan students of Irish America, and for commentators and analysts of the Irish diaspora generally. At last a superbly researched and rigorously though through challenge to - I would say demolition of - the mythological orthodoxy generated by the dominance, in image-making, of the Irish ghettos of New York, Boston, Philadelphia. * Patrick O'Farrell, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 8, No.2 *
What a marvelous Liberation for scholarship! * Patrick O'Farrell, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 8, No.2 *
it is a highly professional, very well-informed, and toughly intelligent sociological exercise, based on wide and exhaustive interviews. These are set on a firm historiographical and geographic base, subjected to constant discussion between the author and his two research assistants, and analysed with patient, open-minded, care and balance. * Patrick O'Farrell, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 8, No.2 *
If only sociology were always like this! * Patrick O'Farrell, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 8, No.2 *
It is a pleasure to welcome this book into the front ranks of Irish diaspora studies. * Patrick O'Farrell, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 8, No.2 *
ISBN: 9780198233558
Dimensions: 217mm x 138mm x 18mm
Weight: 391g
328 pages