Ireland, Philadelphia, and the Re-Invention of America, 1760-1800

This book explores the rise of political pluralism, a perennial theme in American history, by focusing closely on the social and political history of the Irish in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. The study's interpretive arc—tracing the shift from an ideally harmonious, single-interest polity to a more combative form of politics marked by ethnic and ideological diversity—squares with most other recent works on American political development, though some scholars may disagree with Maurice J. Bric's claim that genuine political pluralism did not emerge until the last half of the 1790s. Despite its fairly predictable central argument, this exquisitely detailed study offers many original observations about the evolving relationship between ethnicity and politics in early America. On a historiographical level, Bric's subtle grasp of the scholarship on Irish and British political development enables him creatively to resituate North American political history in a richly transatlantic context. New perspectives on familiar events such as the Paxton Boys episode of 1763–1764 and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 emerge when they are interpreted by someone intimately familiar with Ireland's long history of ethnic and political strife. The book's second major achievement is Bric's close and careful reconstruction of Irish American political life between the ratification of the Constitution and Thomas Jefferson's election in 1800. Historians of the early republic have long delighted in quoting from the many Federalists who complained about the disproportionate and dangerous influence of the “wild Irish” on Philadelphia politics, but now we have an extended and judicious examination of these political actors, the organizations they built, and the substantial political resistance they encountered. More effectively than any previous work on the topic, this book blends together a social history that depicts the emergence of Irish ethnicity and a political history that illustrates the dynamic relationship between emerging democratic politics, on one hand, and ethnic aspirations and divisions, on the other

Historiography · Ideology · Irish · Pluralism (philosophy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy

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