Plentiful Country
The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of Five Points and City of Dreams, “a superb revisionist history” of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Great Potato Famine, using their “riveting and deeply personal stories” in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America (Wall Street Journal).
In 1845, a fungus began to destroy Ireland’s potato crop, triggering a famine that would kill one million Irish men, women, and children—and drive over one million more to flee for America. Ten years later, the United States had been transformed by this stupendous migration, nowhere more than New York: by 1855, roughly a third of all adults living in Manhattan were immigrants who had escaped the hunger in Ireland. These so-called “Famine Irish” were the forebears of four U.S. presidents (including Joe Biden) yet when they arrived in America they were consigned to the lowest-paying jobs and subjected to discrimination and ridicule by their new countrymen. Even today, the popular perception of these immigrants is one of destitution and despair. But when we let the Famine Irish narrate their own stories, they paint a far different picture.
In this magisterial work of storytelling and scholarship, acclaimed historian Tyler Anbinder presents for the first time the Famine generation’s individual and collective tales of struggle, perseverance, and triumph. Drawing on newly available records and a ten-year research initiative, Anbinder reclaims the narratives of the refugees who settled in New York City and helped reshape the entire nation. Plentiful Country is a tour de force—a book that rescues the Famine immigrants from the margins of history and restores them to their rightful place at the center of the American story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this eye-opening account, Anbinder (City of Dreams), a historian at George Washington University, draws on records housed in the New York Public Library's archives of the former Emigrant Savings Bank in Manhattan to document the lives of NYC's "famine Irish." Utilizing these banking records to track individual bank patrons over their lifetimes, he shows that even though these immigrants—who fled the famine that followed the Irish potato blight of 1845—began their American lives in poverty and struggle, many were able to prosper. Most started out in New York as unskilled laborers or domestics, though some were skilled craftsmen. The next step was usually to become a peddler, selling such cheaply attained items as apples, corks, and charcoal. Successful sellers rose to become clerks, civil servants, or business owners. A few even made it to the professional class of doctors and lawyers. Following these workers as they climbed this social ladder, Anbinder points out that they were hardworking, frugal, and managed to build up savings and avoid wasteful spending, even as most native-born Americans believed they were "lazy," "indolent," and "utterly lacking in ambition"—an attitude which Anbinder argues is wrongly still the dominant historiographic perspective on the famine Irish. This is a master class in turning a large, data-rich archive into a fluid narrative. Readers will be engrossed.
