Ireland's Great Famine in Irish-American History

Mary C. Kelly is a professor of Modern Irish and American Histories at Franklin Pierce University. She is the author of The Shamrock and the Lily: The New York Irish and the Creation of a Transatlantic Identity (Peter Lang Publishing, 2005).

Kelly examines Ireland's mid-19th-century potato famine, its consequences within the transatlantic community, and the long-term impact of this event on the Irish psyche in the US. She recounts with impressive detail the mind-set of the Irish American community concerning an Gorta Mór and its linkages to ethnic identity, sociocultural constructions of victimhood, and the difficult process of remembering and internalizing such a tragic event. Although commemoration of the famine eventually found a vast global audience by the late 20th century, the journey was not an easy one. It took well over a century for the offspring of Irish immigrants to the US to recognize and understand the trauma wrought by the potato blight. Feelings of discomfort drove successful second- and third-generation Irish Americans to experience a form of historic amnesia when it came to their ancestors' troubled past. Kelly shows the complex evolution associated with public memory and trauma and the ways political and cultural rhetoric framed this debate. Meticulously researched, the book succeeds in capturing a fresh perspective on a complicated topic. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and researchers/faculty.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Irish Hunger: Irish-American Crucible1 Floodtide: Framing Famine Memory between 1845 and 19002 Latent Memory: Constructing Irish-American Identity in the early 1900s3 Ethnic Progression: Selective Memory by the mid-1900s4 “Where Past and Present Mingle”: Roadways to Remembrance 5 Long Threatening: From Confrontation to Commemoration in the 1990sEpilogue: At the End of the DayBibliographyIndexAbout the Author