The Philadelphia Irish

Qualifying the public sphere of an ethnic community is no easy task. The Gaelic community in 1890s Philadelphia included sports and language leagues, newspapers, abstinence associations, mutual aid societies, charities, church-centered groups, educational initiatives, voluntary social societies, fund-raising organizations, revolutionaries (for Ireland), American patriotic societies, bars, political clubs, historical societies, secret societies, and transnational movements. And, of course, active participants in this self-aware community were involved with many of these groups at the same time, and many more over time. Yet in this comprehensively researched and accessibly presented study, Michael L. Mullan captures both the complexity of the community and the numerous threads of collective action within it. Mullan's concern is with the construction and reproduction of Gaelic society in Philadelphia, referring to the population of Irish Catholics. The older culture of the Protestant Irish in Pennsylvania has little presence in this story, as the text follows the founding of associations among the mid-nineteenth-century postfamine arrivals. These émigrés brought an associational history along with other traditions, all of which helped them survive in the period between the considerable anti-Catholic activism of the 1830s through the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s and on into the early twentieth century, when Irish nationalists fought for and eventually won an independent republic “back home

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