Acclaimed biographer John Loughery tells the story of John Hughes, son of Ireland, friend of William Seward and James Buchanan, founder of St. John’s College (now Fordham University), builder of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, pioneer of parochial-school education, and American diplomat. As archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York in the 1840 and 1850s and the most famous Roman Catholic in America, Hughes defended Catholic institutions in a time of nativist bigotry and church burnings and worked tirelessly to help Irish Catholic immigrants find acceptance in their new homeland. His galvanizing and protecting work and pugnacious style earned him the epithet Dagger John. When the interests of his church and ethnic community were at stake, Hughes acted with purpose and clarity. In Dagger John, Loughery reveals Hughes’s life as it unfolded amid turbulent times for the religious and ethnic minority he represented. Hughes the public figure comes to the fore, illuminated by Loughery’s retelling of his interactions with, and responses to, every major figure of his era, including his critics (Walt Whitman, James Gordon Bennett, and Horace Greeley) and his admirers (Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln). Loughery peels back the layers of the public life of this complicated man, showing how he reveled in the controversies he provoked and believed he had lived to see many of his goals achieved until his dreams came crashing down during the Draft Riots of 1863 when violence set Manhattan ablaze. To know "Dagger" John Hughes is to understand the United States during a painful period of growth as the nation headed toward civil war. Dagger John’s successes and failures, his public relationships and private trials, and his legacy in the Irish Catholic community and beyond provide context and layers of detail for the larger history of a modern culture unfolding in his wake.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1866.

Bishop John J. Hughes, His Church and the Coming of Age of New York's Catholic Irish traces key events in the transformation of the Catholic Church in New York and nationally as the result of the aggressive leadership of New York's fourth diocesan Bishop and first Archbishop, John J. Hughes. Hughes accomplished much for the Church through the building of a strong Catholic community spurred in large part from the massive number of Catholic Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine in Ireland. Though never far from controversy, Hughes, through emphasis on education and the establishment of a strong network of religious, charitable and social institutions, started his people and church on the road to political power and influence in 19th century America and beyond.

A brilliant writer, outstanding orator, and charismatic politician, Thomas D'Arcy McGee is best known for his prominent role in Irish-Canadian politics, his inspirational speeches in support of Canadian Confederation, and his assassination by an Irish revolutionary who accused him of betraying his earlier Irish nationalist principles. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the first volume in a two-part biography, explores the development of those principles in Ireland and the United States. David Wilson follows McGee from Wexford, Ireland across the Atlantic to Boston, where at nineteen he became the editor of America's leading Irish newspaper, and traces his subsequent involvement with the Young Ireland movement, his reactions to the Famine, and his role in the Rising of 1848. Wilson goes on to examine McGee's experiences as a political refugee in the United States, where his increasing disillusionment with revolutionary Irish nationalism and his opposition to American nativism propelled him towards conservative Catholicism and sent him on a trajectory that ultimately led to Canada - his experiences are the subject of volume 2, Thomas D'Arcy McGee: The Extreme Moderate, 1857-1868.