New York Irish History Roundtable - Journal Articles

While the number of persons of foreign birth is available by state in the various census counts done by the United States since 1790, there is still a scarcity of research on specific ethnic groups. To understand these groups more fully, there is a need to discover what is behind people's names and addresses, especially their motives for coming here and the details of their lives in America. The Irish migrated to the New World, especially to the United States, for economic, political, and religious reasons, and they played a significant... [Read Full Article]

Dublin Clothiers in 1941 set the style in clothing for many Irish immigrants, but immigrants from that county set no pattern of neighborhood settlement unlike people from most other Irish counties. Courtesy of John T. Ridge. $16.50 Hats -.. Shirts Underwi LARGE STOCK OF HURLEYS AND FOOTBALL SUPPLIES 467 WEST 125th ST. (Near Amst, Ave.), N. Y. CITY Phone MOp: 1-0461 Open 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. educational opportunities were the most limited. In contrast, the eastern seaboard of Ireland sent far fewer numbers across the ocean but, in some cases,... [Read Full Article]

He was born on November 28, 1831, in a slum in Dublin, Ireland, a start in life which most would consider highly inauspicious. Thus began the incredibly full, complex and contradictory life of John William Mackay. However, long before he died during a business trip to London, England, on July 20, 1902, he would become the seventeenth richest person in the entire world. Even more amazing than his wealth is that so many people today, including most Irish Americans, know very little, if anything, of Mackay's life and... [Read Full Article]

In the mid-eighteenth century, severe agricultural and financial crises forced thousands to leave Ireland for British North America. A great number of them arrived in the Middle Atlantic colonies - many as indentured servants. These indentured servants had agreed to exchange their labor for a fixed period - often seven years - to pay for the cost of their passage to America. This wave of immigrants arrived at a pivotal time in the nation's formation, and played a key role in the new nation's economy and contributed to the... [Read Full Article]

During the Great Famine Migration of 1845- 1854, more than a million men, women and children fled Ireland, traveled across the Atlantic Ocean and flooded into New York City. Arriving in large numbers, the Irish soon inundated the City's already inadequate infrastructure. For most, the Quarantine Establishment on Staten Island was the place where immigrants first came into contact with official representatives of their new country.

In 1758, the New York State Legislature had established the Quarantine in response to ... [Read Full Article]

A little more than a century ago, the Abbey Theatre's Irish Players arrived in the United States for their first American tour, a tour that would become infamous for the riotous reception the New York Irish afforded John Synge's The Playboy of the Western World.

The advance-man for this tour was of course William Butler Yeats, who in a variety of interviews presented The Playboy in particular, and the repertoire of his National Theatre in general, as a much-needed antidote to the sentimental and... [Read Full Article]

Most histories of the immigrant Irish families that settled in New York City tell a familiar story. Usually a pioneer member of the family arrives sometime in the nineteenth century and sets up a pattern of emigration from the old country that continues from one generation to the next. Siblings follow siblings, nieces and nephews follow aunts and uncles, cousins follow cousins, friends follow friends, and the pattern repeats itself from one era to the next.

But major events occur and interrupt that continuity, and... [Read Full Article]

From the early years of the Catholic Church in America, its leaders officially attempted to stay out of the question of an independent Ireland. Although the Irish-Americans who made up a large part of the Church's flock supported Irish freedom in varying degrees over the years, the hierarchy needed to balance this support with the desire of the larger church for a position of stability, respectability, and power in American society, where support for or affiliation with Ireland had led to charges of anti-Americanism in the... [Read Full Article]

Harvey Strum is a professor of history and political science at the Sage Colleges in Albany and Troy, N.Y. He is the program director for Public Affairs and Public Policy. He grew up in the Bronx and obtained a B.A., M.P.A. and Ph.D. from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, and a M.A. from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. His research interests are the politics and foreign policy of the early national period, War of 1812, World War II, the American reaction to the Irish famine, and American Jewish... [Read Full Article]

Peter J. McGuinness (1888-1948) was a highly successful Irish-American Brooklyn Democratic politician who, in the 1930s and 1940s, was a living anachronism. After World War II, when Tammany Hall was dying out and reform and fusion were the new political forces reshaping New York City politics, McGuinness ruled his ward as the last Tammany-Hall style ward boss in the city. His nearly thirty years of political rule in Greenpoint were a product of old-school Democratic machine politics that he learned as a local boy and as a... [Read Full Article]