Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910 Review"Between 1845 and 1910 approximately five million people left Ireland for the United States. The vast majority of them were Catholic, desperately poor, and without the work skills that could command decent wages." So begins the Introduction to Dr. Emmons' book. This is a very significant text, and a monumental scholarly achievement ... "The product of three decades of research and thought."
The hardback contains 350 pages of description and analysis, and over one hundred pages of supporting material. The font used, smaller than for the typical paperback, crams huge amounts of information into those pages. (Full disclosure: I received this book as a free review copy. For an expanded version of this review, visit my history blog, the "South Fork Companion.")
This book is important because typical histories of the Irish in American tend to focus on "ethnic enclaves" in the larger cities, mostly on the East coast. Emmons tries to fill the resulting gap. His basis thesis: These Irish emigrants were "beyond the pale." They were not just outside the mainstream of American life. Rather, overwhelmingly Protestant America rejected an Irish culture based on an amalgam of Roman Catholicism and ancient Celtic folkways. America's growing industrial engine needed poor and desperate Irish workers, who would take hard, dangerous jobs at rock-bottom wages. But while employers exploited their labor, mainstream society kept them at arms length. Their answer was entirely predictable: "They set up ... their own schools, churches, fraternities, neighborhoods, and rookeries."
The publisher's Product Description describes the book as "masterful yet accessible." It is certainly masterful, but "accessible" may be problematic. The author makes good use of selected Irish-American "folk stories," and his style is not over-loaded with academic jargon. However, his historical discussions are wide-ranging, tightly reasoned, and (sometimes) controversial. They require close, careful study to achieve full understanding.
Beyond the American Pale is an authoritative and valuable treatise on the history of the Irish in the American West. Readers with an interest in that subject should find it well worth their time.
Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910 OverviewConvention has it that Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century confined themselves mainly to industrial cities of the East and Midwest. The truth is that Irish Catholics went everywhere in America and often had as much of a presence in the West as in the East. In Beyond the American Pale, David M. Emmons examines this multifaceted experience of westering Irish and, in doing so, offers a fresh and discerning account of America s westward expansion.
Irish in the West is not a historical contradiction, but it is and was a historical problem. Irish Catholics were not supposed to be in the West that was where Protestant Americans went to reinvent themselves. For many of the same reasons that the spread of southern slavery was thought to profane the West, a Catholic presence there was thought to contradict it to contradict America s Protestant individualism and freedom. The Catholic Irish were condemned as the clannish, backward remnants of an old cultural world that Americans self-consciously sought to leave behind. The sons and daughters of Erin were not assimilated, and because they were not assimilable, they should be kept beyond the American pale.
As Emmons amply demonstrates, however, western reality was far more complicated. Irish Catholicism may have outraged Protestant-inspired American republicanism, but Irish Catholics were a necessary component of America s equally Protestant-inspired foray into industrial capitalism. They were also necessary to the successive conquests of the frontier, wherever it might be found. It was the Irish who helped build the railroads, dig the hard rocks, man the army posts, and do the other arduous, dangerous, and unattractive toiling required by an industrializing society.
With vigor and panache, Emmons describes how the West was not so much won as continually contested and reshaped. He probes the self-fulfilling mythology of the American West, along with the far different mythology of the Irish pioneers. The product of three decades of research and thought, Beyond the American Pale is a masterful yet accessible recasting of American history, the culminating work of a singular thinker willing to take a wholly new perspective on the past.

Want to learn more information about Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now