Lawrence E. Cline. Rebels on the Niagara

The history of immigrant Irish settlement in the United States bears the imprint of the Great Famine of the 1840s and early 1850s, the magnitude of which expanded the Irish presence and transformed the ethnic profile. Cast adrift from agricultural smallholdings, generally lacking employment options other than menial labor, and unwelcome by virtue of their predominantly Catholic denominational affiliation, a million and a half Great Hunger refugees clustered within East Coast urban tenement and shanty quarters. Within a decade, the communities they established and the cultural and political proclivities they engaged rooted an Irish American narrative that sustained for the next century and a half. Recent historiographical forays beyond these traditional markers have expanded the field in profitable ways, however. Among them, the two monographs under consideration here, Ryan W. Keating’s Shades of Green: Irish Regiments, American Soldiers, and Local Communities in the Civil War Era and Lawrence E. Cline’s Rebels on the Niagara: The Fenian Invasion of Canada, 1866, address cohorts of immigrant Irish whose fortunes, capabilities, or caprices both reflected and ranged beyond the experiences of their urban-based Famine-era compatriots.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Cline (biology) · Economic history · Ethnology · Famine · Historiography · Immigration · Irish · Political science · Politics · Population · Settlement (finance) · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Suburbanization · Canadian Identity and History · Demography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies