Book Reviews (review)

The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Edited by Michael Glazier. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1999. Pp. xxiii, 988. $89.95.)

In his "Introduction" to The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, the editor, Michael Glazier, recalls his own emigration from Ireland to America, the "cold winter afternoon when I stood on the deck of the Saxonia and watched Ireland recede into the horizon." More than five million men, women and children shared that experience, watching their native Ireland "recede" and disappear over the horizon as they traveled to a new home in the United States. Today more than forty million Americans trace their ancestry to the people who made that journey. From Richard Butler of Tipperary, who landed somewhere near Ocracoke Island on what is now the coast of North Carolina in 1584, to yesterday's immigrant, and the ten, eleven, or twelve generations in between, the number of Irish Americans must reach into the hundreds of millions. Glazier's compendium of their experience is long overdue, but these sheer numbers and the diversity and breadth of Irish American backgrounds suggest why an encyclopedia of Irish American history is such a daunting task and has not been done before.

Glazier's book has met this formidable challenge. It is exceptionally well thought through. One feature Glazier rightly points to with pride in his "Introduction" is the inclusion of separate essays on the Irish in all fifty states and all major American cities. That alone is a great help to anyone with even a casual interest in Irish Americans, for it means that they can find a short, comprehensive narrative and basic data on the Irish in any part of the United States.

Glazier also notes a special effort to make the volume broadly inclusive of the wide range of the Irish experience in America. He points, in particular, to a special effort to include the oft-neglected history of Protestant Irish immigrants and their descendants in the volume. Here the Encyclopedia achieves mixed success. The volume does, indeed, include many entries on important people, places, events, or organizations in the history of Protestant Irish immigrants or their children and grandchildren. For example, it has a neat description of the Eagle Wing project, an attempt by Ulster Presbyterians to emigrate to America in 1636 thwarted by bad weather. David Doyle also turns in his usual, superbly well-informed and provocative work in a rich and interesting entry on the "Scots Irish or Scotch Irish." The Encyclopedia also provides a full presentation of the controversial "Celtic origins" interpretation of southern culture by the authors of that interpretation, Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald, in an entry on the "Irish Heritage of the South." Nevertheless, some possible topics that would seem pertinent to the history of Protestant Irish Americans, particularly the Ulster Irish migrants of the colonial or Revolutionary eras, are neglected. There is an entry--and rightfully so--on John L. Sullivan, the famous turn-of-the-century Irish Catholic boxer, for example, but there is none on John Sullivan, the Revolutionary war general and later Governor of New Hampshire. There is also none on the "Regulators," the largely Irish rebels from the southern backcountry who rose against eastern elites before the American Revolution, or similarly, the "Paxton Boys," again largely Irish, who slaughtered native Americans in a protest of the Quaker-controlled government's conciliatory Indian policies in colonial Pennsylvania.

Such few omissions, however, scarcely detract from the Encyclopedia's great value and wonderful contribution to the study of the Irish in America. The breadth of this massive, wide ranging, and extraordinarily informative book of eight hundred entries and 979 pages is stunning. Most of the essays are tightly written, rich with useful detail, analytical, and reflect easy familiarity with the best scholarship. Edward O'Day and Patrick Conley, two veteran and knowledgeable historians of Irish America, for example, have written excellent...