Two centuries of Irish emigration to the U.S. are portrayed through rare photos and the letters of emigrants writing of their New World experiences.

Mass immigration to the United States was nowhere more apparent than in the immigration of the Irish between 1815 and the failure of the potato crop in 1845/1846, during which time a million Irish men and women emigrated here. This book provides a detailed account of the economic, social, and political factors underlying the early migrations; an examination of the emigrant trade and its links with American shipping interests; and a history of government policy regarding assisted and unassisted emigration.

Discusses the reasons Irish people left their homeland to come to America, the experiences immigrants had in the new country, and the contributions this cultural group made to American society. Includes sidebars and activities.

Explains the reasons for the large Irish emigration, and examines the problems they faced adjusting to new lives in the United States.

Unintended Consequences reveals how America’s door closed on legal Irish immigration in the 1960s, and how America’s Irish mounted a counterattack when nation-changing political forces were sweeping the country during the era of civil rights, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War. This book looks at the full historical background to Irish migration across the Atlantic, how it helped shape the young republic, and how the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 brought a near total halt to this westward flow. Nevertheless, the Irish would not be denied and continued to make the journey, no longer into the light of a full and legal American life, but rather into the shadows of an undocumented existence. Successive organisations championed the undocumented Irish, and the fight continues to this day, but this is a new America, where, in recent years, there has been growing hostility to immigrants of every nationality. Ray O’Hanlon has spent over three decades reporting on battles over comprehensive U.S. immigration reform, and Unintended Consequences is the story of the Irish past, its present, and most uncertain future in the ‘land of the free,’ now in the presidency of Joe Biden, a man who fully embraces his Irish immigrant family story. Through Biden, the great Irish of America story continues, and with renewed hope.

A three-dimensional book featuring images and documents of Irish immigrants.

Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan is a monumental and pathbreaking study of early Irish Protestant and Catholic migration to America. Through exhaustive research and sensitive analyses of the letters, memoirs, and other writings, the authors describe the variety and vitality of early Irish immigrant experiences, ranging from those of frontier farmers and seaport workers to revolutionaries and loyalists. Largely through the migrants own words, it brings to life the networks, work, and experiences of these immigrants who shaped the formative stages of American society and its Irish communities. The authors explore why Irishmen and women left home and how they adapted to colonial and revolutionary America, in the process creating modern Irish and Irish-American identities on the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan was the winner of the James S. Donnelly, Sr., Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences, American Council on Irish Studies.

In the century between the Napoleonic Wars and the Irish Civil War, more than seven million Irish men and women left their homeland to begin new lives abroad. While the majority settled in the United States, Irish emigrants dispersed across the globe, many of them finding their way to another “New World,” Australia. Ireland’s New Worlds is the first book to compare Irish immigrants in the United States and Australia. In a profound challenge to the national histories that frame most accounts of the Irish diaspora, Malcolm Campbell highlights the ways that economic, social, and cultural conditions shaped distinct experiences for Irish immigrants in each country, and sometimes in different parts of the same country. From differences in the level of hostility that Irish immigrants faced to the contrasting economies of the United States and Australia, Campbell finds that there was much more to the experiences of Irish immigrants than their essential “Irishness.” America’s Irish, for example, were primarily drawn into the population of unskilled laborers congregating in cities, while Australia’s Irish, like their fellow colonialists, were more likely to engage in farming. Campbell shows how local conditions intersected with immigrants’ Irish backgrounds and traditions to create surprisingly varied experiences in Ireland’s new worlds. Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association “Well conceived and thoroughly researched . . . . This clearly written, thought-provoking work fulfills the considerable ambitions of comparative migration studies.”—Choice

"While all other European nations increased in population during the [nineteenth] century, the population of Ireland decreased at every census except one between 1841 and 1961; the number of persons living in Ireland in 1966 was less than half that of 1841. Of all Western European countries, Ireland has the greatest amount of postponed marriage and permanent celibacy, and yet it also has the highest marital fertility rate ... It is unsettling to social scientists to admit the existence of an apparent exception to so many well known and widely accepted theories concerning population growth, urbanization, emigration, age and marriage, and family size. The aim of this book is to distinguish some of the more interesting elements of Irish life which are indeed peculiar to Ireland from those which Ireland shares, to a greater or lesser degree, with other countries"--