Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration (review)

Kerby Miller is best known for his monumental Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Notwithstanding its length (684 pages), that prize-winning first book did not come close to exhausting the author's principal sources: a massive array of correspondence and memoirs of Irish immigrants to America from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Not only had he searched nearly every public repository on both sides of the Atlantic that might contain such material, but he had also placed notices in local newspapers throughout Ireland requesting access to emigrant letters in private hands. By the time he completed the book he had accumulated photocopies of literally thousands of letters and other manuscripts.

Miller has continued, to the great advantage of students of Ireland and the Irish diaspora, to exploit his treasure trove in two ways. First, in collaboration with several other scholars, he has projected a four-volume selection of the documents, of which the first volume, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), has been published. Second, he has written numerous essays, typically based on a memoir, a letter or a series of letters that reveals the experience of one or more immigrants. The book under review is a collection of such essays.

The fifteen essays in the collection are divided into three clusters of five essays each. Two of the clusters deal with (mainly Catholic) emigration from Ireland and immigration to America, respectively. This division vividly illustrates why Miller's work is so widely respected: more thoroughly than anyone else in the field he has mastered both Irish history and U.S. history. Furthermore, when he perceives that a particular correspondence may contain components of a revealing narrative, he relentlessly pursues other sources for every shred of information on the correspondents. One is tempted to categorize his method as micro-history but for the fact that he invariably places his findings into the context of relevant macro-historical literature on social, political, economic and demographic issues.

The other cluster of essays deals specifically with Irish Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic. Although the author divides his essays along sectarian lines, he does not subscribe to the supposed primordial division of Irish society that used to dominate most discourse on Irish migration. Within both Protestant and Catholic sides he sees social class as the major determinant of the lives of his subjects. At the micro-history level, for example, a Protestant "middleman" whose living depended on his subletting of farms to Catholics in the Irish midlands is forced a few years before the Famine by a new and less patriarchal landlord to find a more modest farm for himself in a predominantly Protestant area farther north. At the macro-history level, middle-class, post-Famine Catholic immigrants in American cities find it necessary to become the political leaders of the more numerous impoverished Catholic immigrants and "civilize" them in order to secure their own status. For Miller developments such as these are far more important than enthusiasm evoked by either orange or green.

At the end of the book, the author offers a passionate attack on "revisionism" in Irish history. Readers who do not follow academic politics in Ireland may be puzzled by this epilogue, for no one in the past generation has been more effective in the revision of our understanding of the trans-Atlantic Irish experience than Kerby Miller.