Dear list-members,

We have heard from one list moderator, Russell Murray.

And I have just been told about the other two, Lynda Prescott and Brid
Featherstone...

Lynda is ill with the flu - this is the flu with the throbbing headache
and the dizzy spells...

Brid has sealed herself into a small room so that she can finish writing
her book about post-modernism and social work...

Which only goes to show why we need a team of people to watch over
things here.

But we can manage...

The list can now begin... doing whatever it wants to do.

Some lists like people to send in little potted CVs, about activities
and interests. Others have highly organised book reviewing systems.

We have to decide how we want to begin.

I am not sure we have quite reached critical mass. So, the list should
grow 'through invitation and introduction' - let people know.

Thank you all, for your patience, and interest.

Paddy O'Sullivan


Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora
Yorkshire Playwrights http://www.poptel.org.uk/unholy/yp

Well, for a start, does anyone know (or wish to speculate on) how the
word 'Irish' became associated with the concept of 'luck' or 'good
fortune'? This IS a serious research question, by the way! Thanks!

Marion R. Casey
Dept. of History
New York University

It is, I think, a sign that the irish-diaspora list has not yet reached
critical mass that I cannot think of any way of answering Marion Casey's
query about 'the luck of the Irish'.

My first instinct was that we must be dealing with yet another
sub-department of the 'native/settler' stereotype - in effect, 'the
happy-go-lucky Irish'. But how you would search that out I don't know.

Then I recalled that my father would say, whenever disaster threatened -
which was often - 'The luck of the Irish!' With heavy irony. But also,
when something good happened - which was rare - he would say, 'The luck
of the Irish!' Almost jovially.

I think this may be a question for Bruce Stewart, with his devastating
databases. Bruce will be joining the list within the next few days.

Paddy

Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora
Yorkshire Playwrights http://www.poptel.org.uk/unholy/yp



Marion R. Casey wrote:
>
> Well, for a start, does anyone know (or wish to speculate on) how the
> word 'Irish' became associated with the concept of 'luck' or 'good
> fortune'? This IS a serious research question, by the way! Thanks!
>
> Marion R. Casey
> Dept. of History
> New York University

Date Wed, 14 Jan 1998 08:57:11 GMT
From: don.macraild[at]sunderland.ac.uk (MACRAILD Don)
Reply-To: irish-diaspora[at]bradford.ac.uk
To: irish-diaspora[at]bradford.ac.uk
Sender: owner-irish-diaspora[at]bradford.ac.uk
Precedence: bulk

Don MacRaild visited the Irish Diaspora Studies Web site, and, enthused
thereby, went on to buy a copy of Bayor & Meagher. He writes...


New York, New York: a further comment

Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, eds, The New York Irish , The
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1996, 743 pp

This is one of the most important studies in the canon of Irish Diaspora
studies. It is a very good and a very overdue book. How could New York
be overlooked in this way until now? Is it because its Irish heritage is
too big and the story too important? Perhaps. Maybe the main problem has
been that the New York Irish required a monumental team effort for
anything meaningful to be produced in a single life-time. The range of
this book is astonishing, and the way its components meet the wider
brief is a credit to the organisational skills of the editors. This is a
sort of academic community history project and I have never seen
anything quite like it. Perhaps historians of Glasgow, Liverpool,
Manchester or Newcastle might bring such methods and insights into our
corner of the Diaspora?

Don MacRaild, University of Sunderland

I want to follow up on Donald MacRaild's comments on the Bayor & Meagher
volume, The New York Irish.

As my own review - see the Irish Diaspora Studies web site, and Irish
Studies Review (forthcoming) - made clear I do endorse Don's comments. This
volume builds to the strengths of the multi-author project.

At the end of my review I suggested that the other city that cried out for
the 'Roundtable - Bayor & Meagher treatment' was London. And for a similar
complex of reasons. First the economic, then the political.

One of my publishers, Cassell, has indicated interest in seeing a formal
proposal.

I thought... a fairly long chronology - certainly including the eighteenth
century. London as the economic power and Ireland as part of
its hinterland. In various periods. London as the political centre of the
empire - especially under the Union. Much on literature, especially
theatre and drama - especially C18th (one of my interests) and C19th. And
autobiography. And other cultural formations. Sport. Interactions between
all these.

Working title:
A Wonderful Place: the Irish in London, 1413-2000

Eh?

Paddy


Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora
Yorkshire Playwrights http://www.poptel.org.uk/unholy/yp







> Don MacRaild visited the Irish Diaspora Studies Web site, and, enthused
> thereby, went on to buy a copy of Bayor & Meagher. He writes...
>
>
> New York, New York: a further comment
>
> Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, eds, The New York Irish , The
> Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1996, 743 pp
>
> This is one of the most important studies in the canon of Irish Diaspora
> studies. It is a very good and a very overdue book. How could New York
> be overlooked in this way until now? Is it because its Irish heritage is
> too big and the story too important? Perhaps. Maybe the main problem has
> been that the New York Irish required a monumental team effort for
> anything meaningful to be produced in a single life-time. The range of
> this book is astonishing, and the way its components meet the wider
> brief is a credit to the organisational skills of the editors. This is a
> sort of academic community history project and I have never seen
> anything quite like it. Perhaps historians of Glasgow, Liverpool,
> Manchester or Newcastle might bring such methods and insights into our
> corner of the Diaspora?
>
> Don MacRaild, University of Sunderland
>
>

Reply To: irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk
To: irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk
Sender: owner-irish-diaspora[at]bradford.ac.uk
Precedence: bulk


>From "Marion R. Casey"

A book on the London Irish and their relationship to Ireland is a
terrific
idea! (By the way, Donald MacRaild's comments on Bayor & Meagher have
warmed many hearts here in New York this winter!)

One of the most surprisingly informative sessions for me at the
recent Scattering Conference (Irish Centre for Migration Studies,
University College Cork) was a paper by Dave Edwards of the UCC History
Department on the London Irish, 1459-1650. I recall that he discussed
Irish orchard owners from Kilkenny who were critical suppliers to the
London costermonger trade, and who formed one of the first Irish
community
nuclei in London. It is important to approach city histories from
aspects
like this, because such things were elemental to urban development, to
the
eventual transformation into a metropolis. In New York, the equivalent
would be the Irish in the 18th century linen trade.

Marion R. Casey
Department of History
New York University

Message from Don MacRaild:

Paddy'e idea seems a good one, though I'm sure that London is such a
`Wonderful Place'! London is much underplayed as a political centre for
the
Irish - a city where MPs / jobbing journalists could earn a crust in the
day-time before filibustering the night away at the Palace of
Westminster.
There are also flashes of an earlier, plebeian Irish political culture
in,
for example, Ian McCalman's brilliant book The Revolutionary Underworld
-
men such as the Binns brothers are just as important in their way as the
great `Tay Pay' O'Connor, are they not? Yes, yes, there is much in
London
which demands the New York treatment.

Cheers

Don MacRaild

My report on
Eleventh Conference of Irish Historians in Britain
Memory and Commemoration in Irish History
University of Durham, April 3-5, 1998

The sequence of Conferences of Irish Historians in Britain was started
by Marianne Elliott and Roy Foster when they were - oooh - about so
high. The Conference takes place every two years. This year in
Durham. The last time the Conference was held in Durham it was at the
height of the 'revisionist/anti-revisionist' controversy - a very
rumbustious affair. This year was a much quieter event - and not as
well attended.

I like Marianne and Roy's Conferences. I like to watch the historian in
her/his habitat (that is, surrounded by other historians). I like the
determined effort to give space to younger scholars. It was a real
pleasure being able to meet people who are just beginning their
research, and wanting to talk about it, or thinking about publishing,
or... And I like being able to put faces to names.

So, highlights for me... As soon as I arrived I was plunged into
conversation with Cathy Swift of Maynooth - who gave a paper on the High
Kings of Tara. This was the by now standard conversation I have with
archaeologists (eg with Charles Orser) about how archaeologists
interpret evidence. The example Cathy gave was one that had puzzled me
- ok we know how much wood you need to smelt bronze for one axe-head.
But what does that really tell us about social organisation?

Alan Ford and I have exchanged bits of paper about theology and history
- and here he was, with a very neat moustache, talking about James
Ussher. Kevin O'Neill was visiting from Boston, and gave a very well
received paper on the Star-Spangled Shamrock - Irish-Americanism and
militarism. In fact the audience reaction was very interesting - I
assume every Irish-American lad learns of Patrick Henry O'Rourke at his
mother's knee. Here it was all new.

Alan Heesom on the Marquess of Londonderry and his County Down tenants -
based on the Londonderry archives - gave fascinating insights into the
finances of an Anglo-Irish landlord. And Edna Longley, on Poetry and
Forgetting, was very good. I sometimes have trouble following Edna
Longley - the sentences can be so precise, subtle, allusive, elusive and
I cannot see quite how one sentence connects to the next. Here, on
remembering, she suggested that in Northern Ireland the word 'remember'
needs an aggrsssive preposition. 'We remember AT someone else.' And
she suggested that, instead of remembering we should build a monument to
Amnesia, and then forget where we put it. But where would that leave
historians?

I like visiting Durham anyway, for two reasons. One, it is a beautiful
city, with that wonderful Norman cathedral - and yes I did go to pay
homage at the tomb of Bede. The other is that Sheridan Gilley (editor of
the Swift & Gilley volumes, biographer of Newman) lives there, and I am
very fond of him. He has been unwell recently, and I see it as my job
to take him for walks and make him laugh. (This meant - I have to say -
that I missed some of the Conference papers.) At breakfast one day I
told Sheridan the story of the fish goujon - he looked at me with kindly
concern, and then began to laugh, and laughed till tears rolled down his
face. A good day's work, I thought.

Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora
Yorkshire Playwrights http://www.poptel.org.uk/unholy/yp

Dear Paddy,

Such a touching recounting of your visit with Dr. Gilley.... I too
admire
his work, but I have had difficulty obtaining a copy of his critique of
L.
Perry Curtis' "Apes & Angels." Gilley's critique is titled "English
Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780-1900," in "Immigrants and
Minorities in British Society," ed. C. Holmes (London: 1978), 81-110.
If
you have any means of finding this article, could you forward a copy to
me
at: 1370 Skiles Lane, St. Paul, MN 55112.

I have not had an opportunity to redraft an abstract about "Work" that
might appear on the calendar project. Let me know if that would
absolutely
assist in bringing the project to a more definite stage....

I look forward to your mail, every day. You're doing a marvelous job
with
the IDS list!!!


All the best,
Joel Hollander

Patrick,

I'd love to get through the millenium year with the Irish Diaspora in
World
Art. If AIB balks, can you interest a museum? In the U.S., such themed
art
calendars are major money-makers for the Smithsonian Museums, and others
I'm sure.

As for Monuments, I'm not so sure. In addition to Fontenoy, the celtic
cross, with wolfhound, honouring the Irish Brigade at Gettysburg. The
celtic cross honouring the WWI 16th (Irish) Division at
Guillemot/Ginchy.
The Robert Emmet statue in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park; in
Emmetsburg,
Iowa; on Massachussetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., and St. Stephen's
Green, Dublin. I've been told there are 30 monuments to Robert in the
U.S.
alone, but cannot find a reference. Anyone?

Also, Kevin Whelan thinks that the Emmet Monument (this one to Robert's
older brother Thomas Addis) at St. Paul's Chapel, New York, includes the
first inscription in Irish on an Irish monument anywhere in the world.
This
obelisk was erected in 1832. Can anyone confirm, or comment on, Dr.
Whelan's theory?

Brian McGinn
Alexandria, Virginia
bmcginn[at]clark.net

We have been asked to bring the following announcement to the attention
of the Irish-Diaspora list. Would Ir-D list members please pass on the
announcement to other interested lists and groups.

Booklet
The Great Hunger Commemoration Service
St. Anthony's Church
Scotland Road, Liverpool, England
Friday October 3 1997

Following the discovery of mass famine graves, and following on from a
number of local history projects, a Service of Commemoration was held in
St. Anthony's Church, Liverpool, on Friday October 3 1997. A booklet
has now been produced, which records that Commemoration Service. This
includes the texts of the following addresses:
'Liverpool, the Cemetery of Ireland' by Professor Frank Neal, University
of Salford
'Time for Justice' by Tim Allen of CAFOD
'A New Covenant with the Poor' by Archbishop Patrick Kelly.

The booklet includes a selection of newspaper items which trace
chronologically the events in Liverpool during the awful year of 1847.
Amongst these is a picture of the memorial to the ten Catholic priests
who died that year, of typhus, contracted whilst ministering to the
sick.

The rest of the booklet is made up of two lists - a list of the names of
the 2303 men, women and children who were buried at St. Anthony's during
the year 1847, and the names of the 7219 paupers, with age and religious
affiliation, who were buried by the poor law authorities in Liverpool
that year. 73% of these were Catholics.

The booklet, as well as being a work of commemoration, is thus also
potentially a historical source. In his address Professor Frank Neal
says: 'History tends to be written in terms of the lives of the rich
and powerful. I believe that, where possible, the poor should be
rescued from obscurity, if for no other reason than to remind us that
the statistics of disease and death refer to real people...'

Copies of the booklet are now on sale - cost 5.50. Cheques should be
made payable to 'St. Anthony's History Account'. The address to write
to is:

Fr. Tom Williams
St. Anthony's Church
Scotland Road
Liverpool
England

Proceeds from the sale of the booklet will go to the Liverpool Famine
Memorial Committee and to CAFOD.

End of Announcement

Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-CivWar[at]h-net.msu.edu (July, 1998)

James Walvin. _Questioning Slavery_. London: Routledge, 1997. xi
+ 202 pp. Notes and index. $67.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-415-15356-5;
$19.95 (paper), ISBN 04-415-15357-3.

Lawrence R. Tenzer. _The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New
Look at the Slavery Issue_. Manahawkin, N.J: Scholars' Publishing
House, 1997. xxvi + 273 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes,
bibliography, and index. $16.95 (paper), ISBN 0-9628348-0-7.

Reviewed for H-CivWar by James L. Huston
, Oklahoma State University

Slavery is at the heart of the modern western European, American,
and African experiences in respect to economics, social customs, and
moral theorizing. So much is written on the subject because there
is still so much to learn from it. James Walvin takes a broad look
at the development of the institution in the British-speaking areas
of North America while Lawrence Tenzer probes one particular reason
for its ending. Walvin offers a refreshing synthesis of the
literature that has appeared in the last twenty-five years, while
Tenzer produces an interesting but debatable reason for the North's
hostility to the peculiar institution.

James Walvin has been engaged in investigating British slavery,
especially in the Caribbean, for several decades. Besides authoring
numerous books, he is one of the editors of the British Journal
_Slavery and Abolition_ and thus has been in a position to observe
the changing flow of studies on the institution. His work
synthesizes the recent literature on the growth and demise of
slavery in the British-speaking American world and thereby performs
a welcome service for scholars who wish to keep abreast of the
field. Nevertheless, the book is a sketch of scholarly developments
that the author has molded to his purposes; as Walvin states in his
introduction, the work does not present the points at issue in the
innumerable controversies that rage over slavery, nor does it seek
to include all topics relating to the institution. Walvin's
subjects--actually, his chapter headings--are the European
experience with slavery in the past, the origins of the institution,
the reason for the enslavement of Africans, the impact of slavery
upon the developing European economy, the means of domination and
its effect upon the enslaved, the different roles of male and female
slaves, slave resistance, and the demise of the institution.
However, within these headings are distinct themes that Walvin
hammers home.

First, slavery was wholly an economic institution. Its purpose
everywhere was to provide a labor supply. As an economic
institution, slavery stimulated the European economy and assisted
the rise of capitalism by fostering extensive commercial exchange
between Europe and the Americas and by spreading the use of banking
institutions to finance the slave trade. Into this discussion
Walvin then injects the question, why Africans? His answer is
twofold. First, European racial prejudice against Africans can be
traced back to antiquity and certainly to Elizabethan England and,
second, the other supply of cheap labor, Indians, either died out or
proved unproductive. Indeed, Walvin insists that the racial
argument developed because slaveowners found it the best means to
justify slavery in the political realm--his evidence here is
primarily with the West Indies planters.

A second theme running throughout the book is the physical violence
associated with slavery: "The Atlantic slave system was conceived
in and nurtured by violence" (p. 50), and "Once again it is
impossible to understand the realities of slave life without
confronting the ubiquity, the inescapability, of physical
punishment" (p. 58). Walvin notes that violence varied considerably
with demography and circumstance: it was less violent in the
American colonies and the United States, and it was worst in Haiti
and Barbados. The extent of violence, Walvin intimates, ultimately
caused the institution's downfall. In the eighteenth century, a
humanitarian sensibility arose that attacked European practices of
cruelty. This sensibility ultimately was the backbone of the moral
crusade against slavery in Great Britain and the United States. And
against it, slaveholders had few defenses except race.

A third theme that Walvin develops is the unusual extent of
paradoxes involved with slavery. This theme is clearly associated
with the recent literature because it is here that Walvin makes use
of the expanding literature on females and slave community social
life. Only a few of these ironies will be illustrated in this
review. Slaveholders based their public defense of slavery on race
and keeping the races separate; yet interracial sex in the Caribbean
was the norm, not a deviation. Slavery required domination of the
slave, yet as a system slavery could not operate without individual
freedom; the totally dominated slave was economically worthless.
Slaves were property who were legally denied the fruits of their
labor; yet in the Caribbean islands--Jamaica in particular--a slave
market economy arose in which, Walvin states, some twenty percent of
the currency was in the hands of the slaves.

The paradoxes of slavery involve some of the most problematic parts
of the book, and the problem has now been with the profession since
the 1960s. Slavery was a system of oppression, but to follow the
thought to its logical conclusion results in slaves having no
autonomy and no personality--it leads to Stanley Elkins' Sambo.
Thus we enter into the realm of resistance, negotiation, and the
give-and-take of relations between master and slave. Some of this
discussion, as it always has been, is strained. One simply cannot
have extreme exploitation of slaves while simultaneously positing a
vibrant, autonomous slave community. With this reservation aside,
Walvin's book is an excellent read and highly informative.

Of a different character is Lawrence Tenzer's book on the "hidden"
cause of the Civil War. Tenzer's hidden cause is northern fear that
slavery knew no racial boundaries and that eventually the
institution would claim northerners as victims. Leaving aside
momentarily the thesis, Tenzer's work inadvertently raises
disturbing epistemological and methodological questions.

Tenzer's argument is straightforward and quite logically presented.
Slavery's definition depended on the mother's race; by law, any
African blood meant an individual could be enslaved. However,
because of interracial liasons, mulattoes appeared that began losing
a dark skin color. Over the decades, a sizeable number of slaves
appeared who had light skins: skin coloration, in fact, was ceasing
to become the mark of slavery. That circumstance led Tenzer to
conclude that instead of African slavery, the South was practicing
white slavery. Race by the 1850s ceased to be the distinguishing
feature of southern slavery. Northerners recognized this and feared
that the continued existence of slavery would lead to northerners
becoming enslaved. Because skin color no longer was any real guide,
southerners could claim northern whites to be their runaway slaves
and recapture them via the Fugitive Slave Law. Tenzer demonstrates
that the term "white slavery" abounded in the appeals of
abolitionists and Republicans and formed one of their main arguments
to restrict and dismantle slavery. Thus the dread of "white
slavery" becomes one of the hidden causes of the Civil War.

The documentation is not in question. Most historians of the 1850s
will find few documentary discoveries here, and virtually all
scholars have run into this argument. In the literature, it is more
appropriately subsumed under the "slave power conspiracy theory."
The author calls it a hidden cause of the Civil War because he
defines cause as "any political or social dynamic which exacerbated
the tension between the North and the South" (p. xi). This
definition is too broad for me, and what Tenzer has focused upon is
one strand of argument that indeed existed in political antislavery.
Tenzer would stand, I think, on firmer ground if he argued that
northerners feared the competition between free and slave labor
rather than stressing the apprehension about whites becoming slaves,
but his basic point is correct: this argument existed and
supporting evidence for it is unquestionable. It is at this point
that epistemological and methodological problems arise.

The methodological problem is Tenzer's reliance entirely upon
documentary evidence taken from political tracts and speeches and
then imputing from these sources motivations and concerns. Tenzer
has done what virtually all historians--and particularly those
interested in political ideology--have done, and that is to rely
upon the written and spoken word. This work should serve as a
caution against a too ready acceptance of parts of argument and a
belief that words alone are sufficient to reconstruct the past. The
problem is that Tenzer wants to argue that antebellum Americans did
not think of slavery in racial terms. His methodological
shortcoming is that while his documentary evidence is undisputed, he
does not balance it against other evidence or try to assess whether
it was central or a derivative part of more important arguments. To
be specific, the whole South--with the exception of some strange
folk like George Fitzhugh--justified slavery on the basis of race
and claimed that white liberty depended on black slavery. More
important, northern Democrats only sustained southern institutions
because of race. If white slavery had indeed been a pervasive fear,
northern Democrats would have reacted to it--and they did not.
Tenzer is correct that slavery and its legal definition posed
problems in regard to skin color, but the whole of the documentary
evidence is that southern slavery was African slavery and white
Americans knew it.

The epistemological dilemma involves what historians do with the
documentary record. In numerous instances, Tenzer yields a long
quote from a tract or a speech, frequently of abolitionist origin.
He then says northerners had easy access to this material and
therefore absorbed the argument. For example, of abolitionist
charges that southern slavery included white people, Tenzer
summarizes (all in italics), "_The abolitionist newspapers in which
accounts of white slavery appeared were widely read_" (p. 37). But
historians have few ways of knowing what documents were actually
read, how they were received--especially by the multitudes--what
lessons were absorbed, and how people responded to them. Just to be
precise on the point, Republican speeches probably normally carried
five to six major antislavery themes, ranging from morality to
economics to political to racial. Which of these prompted concern on
the part of the northern public? The epistemological problem--and
not just for Tenzer but for those employing the documentary
record--is to figure out how the arguments were received and which
ones actually motivated behavior. If this sounds familiar, it
should. The issue, still unresolved, is the one that haunted the
1970s and 1980s, the one of literary postmodernism and
deconstruction: it is the problem of the semiotics of the text.

Although I doubt that historians will accept Tenzer's thesis, and
they will probably be irked by his introductory concern over
"political correctness" and his tendency to italicize so frequently,
the book is nonetheless worth reading and the problem he poses worth
considering. A fear that slavery would encompass whites did exist,
although not as strongly as Tenzer would have us believe. The
larger framework for consideration--one well suited for class
discussion--is what were the long term ramifications of slavery?
Could slavery be defined racially and the country be continuously
divided into one realm of freedom and one realm of slavery? Were
there no repercussions for free society by having slavery in its
midst? It is in this area that I think Tenzer makes a worthwhile
contribution.

Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact H-Net[at]H-Net.MSU.EDU.

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Urban[at]h-net.msu.edu (July, 1998)

Michael B. Katz. _Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the
"Underclass," and Urban Schools as History_. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995. xi + 179 pp. Notes and index. $35.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-691-02994-6; $12.95 (paper), ISBN 0-691-01605-4.

Reviewed for H-Urban by Barbara Beatty, ,
Wellesley College

Michael Katz dedicates this set of essays summarizing his more than
thirty years of work on the relationship of welfare policy, poverty,
and schooling to his graduate students. Here is a historian at the
top of his form writing about his career, his craft, and his
concerns. Young postmodernists take note. The boundaries of
personal and public history can be crossed, but it takes years of
painstaking research aided by able graduate assistants to do so
effectively.

Katz begins by telling us how he became a historian in the sixties.
He studied history and literature under Perry Miller and Oscar
Handlin as an undergraduate at Harvard, got an M.A.T. in history,
worked as a playschool director at the Cambridge Neighborhood House,
and completed his doctorate in history of education at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education. Of these experiences, he says,
working with poor children and their families affected him the most.
>From them Katz learned lessons that he (and I) did not learn at
Harvard: about "what it took to survive poverty," and that
stereotypes about poor people as passive, incompetent victims were
patronizing and false (p. 146).

This personal story provides the context for the central questions
of _Improving Poor People_. What is the relationship between urban
scholarship and urban activism? Can history play a role in helping
to alleviate the problems of American inner cities? Do historians
advance social reform or retard it? Would historians contribute
more to society if they worked directly on urban problems by
becoming social workers, public interest lawyers, or got degrees in
public policy (p. 3)?

Note what's missing from this list: becoming an urban
schoolteacher. As someone who did become an urban schoolteacher
after graduating from college, I share Katz's assessment of the
transformative effects of working with poor children and their
families. Though I may be biased on this account, Katz's omission
of teaching is indicative of an ambivalence about education which
appears here and elsewhere in his work.

Katz begins each chapter of _Improving Poor People_ with an account
of his personal involvement with the issue at hand. In 1992, he was
appointed to Pennsylvania's Task Force on Reducing Welfare
Dependency. He soon discovered that, for different reasons,
everyone on the task force disliked welfare. Katz thinks historians
can help by explaining why Americans have such antipathy to welfare
and why welfare has been so impervious to real reform. He shows
that American welfare policy has focused on reforming the morals and
behavior of the "undeserving poor" rather than on providing much
needed "outdoor relief." Tracing the development of poorhouses,
"scientific" charity, welfare capitalism, and the limited public
social security of what he calls our "semiwelfare state," Katz
argues that the ideology and power of market models have prevented
the growth of a concept of universal social insurance in the United
States.

The chapter on the "underclass" begins with an account of Katz's
role as historian for the Social Science Research Council's
Committee for Research on the Underclass, initiated by the
Rockefeller Foundation in 1987. He thinks historians can help by
showing how the concept of the "underclass" captured "poverty
discourse" by comparing conditions in inner cities today with what
they used to be, and by hypothesizing about alternative approaches
to welfare that don't pathologize individual behavior. Katz
discusses how the "undeserving poor" became the "underclass," a term
he says is unhelpful because it "muddies debate and inhibits
formulation of constructive policy" (p. 97). He thinks the
situation in deindustrialized inner cities is truly new and more
desperate than in the past, when there were more opportunities for
work. Though I am not an urban economist, I think some
disaggregation would be useful here. Despite Mayor Rudy Giuliani's
current "civilizing" efforts, there is more street-level
entrepreneurialism going on in parts of New York City, for instance,
than in Detroit. But Katz is surely right that we need successful
"place-based" strategies that will reduce urban isolation and
provide jobs. He argues convincingly that although these strategies
should be local, support from the federal government is needed to
fund them.

The chapter on urban schools focuses on the recent decentralization
of public schools in Chicago. Katz describes how during his visit
to Chicago for the first Social Science Research Council
"underclass" conference, he learned from a television newscast
about the election of local school councils made up of parents,
teachers, and community members. Why had this momentous change
received so little national attention, when Katz knew from his
historical research how resistant school bureaucracies were to
reform? So, funded by a grant from the Spencer Foundation, Katz and
two colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania, social
psychologist Michelle Fine and urban anthropologist Elaine Simon,
began following what was happening in Chicago.

To place decentralization in Chicago in context, Katz reviews his
work on the history of organizational models of schooling. Although
incipient bureaucracy won out over paternalistic voluntarism,
corporate voluntarism, and democratic localism, this was not the
inevitable outcome. By the turn of the century, however, urban
schools had become age-graded, hierarchically-structured, mostly
free and compulsory educational systems, administered and taught in
by trained specialists (p. 102). Katz further notes that "the
cultivation and transmission of cognitive skills and intellectual
abilities as ends in themselves" was not one of the original
purposes of public education (p. 110). Here is more of the
ambivalence I mentioned earlier. Although character education and
other social goals were certainly high on the list of rationales for
public education, there is less evidence for lack of focus on
academics. My own research and that of other scholars documents
that many teachers, principals, and teacher educators were deeply
interested in intellectual issues and strongly committed to the
teaching of subject matter. In fact, Larry Cuban's _How Teachers
Taught_ (New York: Teacher's College Press, 1993) and David Tyack
and Larry Cuban's _Tinkering Toward Utopia_ (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1995) suggest that teacher-centered, didactic
academicism has been one of the most enduring characteristics of
American public schools.

Katz thinks school decentralization in Chicago is a true,
broad-based social reform movement. He argues that reformers in
Chicago have access to money and to a school improvement plan based
on "a solid body of empirical evidence" and "carefully articulated
theory" that emphasizes "the relation between educational change and
governance" (p. 117). Note again what's missing from this plan:
the relationship of teachers and teaching methods to educational
reform. Recent research points to the critical importance of how
individual teachers implement pedagogical innovations. As Richard
Elmore, Penelope Peterson, and Sarah McCarthey show in
_Restructuring in the Classroom_ (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Publishers, 1996), the classroom is the level at which educational
reform occurs or is subverted, in both centralized and decentralized
schools. School administrators, especially principals, play a
critical role, as do governance, school finance, teachers' unions,
parents, and other societal factors. But like many academicians,
Katz needs to pay more attention to the details of what's going on
inside classrooms.

Katz puts re-energizing and reeducating teachers at the top of his
list of the implications of history for improving urban schools.
Here too, more attention to teachers would be helpful. If Katz had
examined the social history of urban teachers, he might have phrased
this suggestion differently. Like poor people, teachers are often
stereotyped as passive, incompetent, and in need of improvement.
While many teachers do need help, imposing reeducation without
understanding how reforms affect teachers' already overburdened
workdays is not a promising strategy, as Kate Rousmaniere's _City
Teachers_ (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997) suggests.

So how is school reform in Chicago progressing? Katz knows genuine
reform takes a long time and that it is too soon to tell. He cites
research indicating that school reform in Chicago is going well.
Katz attributes this improvement to democratic localism. But here
again he doesn't show the connection between changes in governance
and what goes on in individual classrooms and schools. Schools in
Chicago have used their autonomy in different ways. We need to know
more about the specifics and effects of these bottom-up reforms.
And new, centralized curriculum standards have been instituted in
Chicago since the experiment began, which may also be a factor.

The question of the success of the Chicago experiment is very
important. Katz describes Chicago school reform as a "vast engine
of adult education" in which parents and community members are
learning through the exercise of democratic localism. But although
parent and community involvement increased in Chicago initially,
data in the April and May 1998 issues of _Catalyst_ show a worrisome
trend of declining participation in local school councils and
elections, as Jeffrey Mirel notes in an upcoming book on urban
education to be published by Brookings next year (personal
correspondence, June 18, 1998).

As Katz knows, children must learn from this experiment too. Scores
on standardized tests given to schoolchildren in Chicago have been
going up. Katz understands that these are not the only measures of
success and briefly mentions new research on alternative forms of
educational assessment. He invokes the mantra of portfolios, a
wonderfully individualized way of evaluating students' work that is
unfortunately also extremely time consuming for teachers and very
vulnerable to subjectivity. So indicators are mixed but generally
positive.

In a larger sense, Katz thinks the outcome of school reform in
Chicago is critical to the future of public education in America.
Can urban school reform stave off increasing demands for
privatization? Can reformers "create a sphere for democracy that
resists the market?" (p. 137). If the Chicago experiment fails,
Katz says, advocates of school "choice" will inherit the field (p.
137). This may be pinning too much on one case and one city. There
are school reform efforts going on throughout the country. Research
on educational reform and school choice emphasizes that it is the
specific details of these plans that matter most, as Bruce Fuller
and Richard Elmore's edited volume, _Who Chooses? Who Loses?_ (New
York: Teachers College Press, 1996) documents. The recent donation
of $100 million for a voucher program for poor children in the New
York City Schools and approval of vouchers for religious schools by
the Wisconsin Supreme Court is further evidence that privatization
is a very real and rapidly increasing possibility. Given all this,
I'm worried about making Chicago school reform the "high stakes
test" for the future of public schools in the United States as a
whole.

In the conclusion of _Improving Poor People_, Katz asks how social
institutions interact in shaping the lives of individuals and
families and how poor people "navigate the terrain" of these
institutions (p. 147). Drawing from qualitative case studies of
Rose Warrington, Mary O'Brien, and Nellie Park, three poor women who
lived in New York City around the turn of the century, Katz
describes in moving detail the strategies individual poor people
used to try to get support for themselves and their families. He
traces routes into and out of dependence, such as illness and
accidents, and remarriage and child labor. In these stories,
mothers and sons seem to have bonded closely, but not all family
members helped each other. Housing, of course, was a terrible
problem. Housekeepers or concierges, positions that rarely exist
today, were often very helpful. Political machines, on the other
hand, did not come to the aid of these poor people, as some
researchers have claimed.

Elegantly written and very usable, _Improving Poor People_
illuminates the complexity of the history of welfare, poverty, and
urban schools. Some institutions helped sometimes, but, looked at
from a different perspective, "institutions reinforced existing
social relations" (p. 165). In general, Katz says, schools were not
among the institutions that helped. Education "as a source of
mobility played almost no role in these stories about New York's
poorest families" (p. 163). This finding should come as no surprise
to readers of Katz's first book, _The Irony of Early School Reform_
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), in which he revised
older scholarship on the positive effects of education. But why,
then, does he place such high hopes on school reform in Chicago?
The irony of Katz's work is that it has contributed to the ideology
of school failure which has fueled the movement for privatization he
opposes. Undoubtedly his research has also been an impetus for
school reform and improvement. These are the unresolvable tensions
between scholarship and activism with which a historian must live,
as Michael Katz knows well.

Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact H-Net[at]H-Net.MSU.EDU.

Martin's post and Paddy's answer prompted me to take McCaffrey's book off
the shelf and look at it from a new perspective. It is very curious that
the word "diaspora" does not appear in the index. I find it once in the
introduction, in a sentence that does not illuminate his choice of this
particular word: "Perhaps the most important thesis of this book is the
assertion that the Irish in the American Diaspora remain part of the
totality of Irish history." American Diaspora? No mention in the
conclusion.

On the other hand the word "ghetto" is used liberally throughout the book
to describe where the Irish lived in the United States. The word
"refugees" is used frequently to describe Irish immigrants in the
nineteenth century. Now these two words, "ghetto" and "refugees,"
practically add up to "diaspora" in popular culture given their
association with the Jewish people in the twentieth century. Is it
possible that the book's title was suggested by the publisher rather than
McCaffrey?

I think Martin Baumann's observation on "diaspora" as a 1990s phenomenon
is sound. I did a quick Library of Congress subject search and they
catalogued 47 items under "Jewish Diaspora" since 1975, most published in
the late 1980s and 1990s.

Marion R. Casey
New York University

What I did in my holidays...

Sometimes, when you are in a small tent with your children, and you are
woken by the sound of the night time rain beating down, there is only
one thing to do... Roll over, snuggle down, go back to sleep, and hope
that everyone sleeps as long as possible in the morning. We awoke to a
grey, flooded camp site...

In the morning we did SOME of the things we had planned to do. We did
visit a part of the Wall that the Roman Emperor Hadrian caused to be
built across the narrow neck of (what is now) England, from Carlisle to
Newcastle. Hadrian's Wall, now a 'world heritage site', remains
extraordinary - a distinctive Roman structure, with distinctive Roman
stonework, stretching for miles across the countryside. Much looted,
over the centuries, of course. We were camped near a fourteenth century
castle - near a gap in Hadrian's Wall. You could see at once that the
castle had ben built with stones taken from the Wall.

I was especially keen to visit the archaeological dig and the museum at
Vindolanda - a major Roman fort and township, a 'vicus', a little way
behind the Wall. There, a wonderful discovery, the archaeologists had
discovered texts - everyday letters and military lists, written on
wooden tablets, wonderfully preserved in the boggy conditions. The
special rewards of archaeology in mud. The Roman soldiers worried about
everyday things like dry socks (I can vouch for the importance of dry
socks...)

One of these texts gives us a new Latin word. In what seems to be a
note about the military traditions of the natives one writer refers to
the 'Brittunculi'. This word combines the word for the 'British' with
the 'perjorative diminutive' - found still in English words drawn from
Latin, like 'homunculus'. The Museum translates it as 'the wretched
British', which seems a bit tame. I would suggest 'the nasty little
British...'

Continuities of imperialism..?

[The texts have been published in Alan K. Bowman, Life and Letters on
the Roman Frontier: Vindolanda and its people, British Museum, 1994.
'Brittunculi' appears on p. 106, where it is translated as 'the wretched
British'. There are a number of Vindolanda sites on the Web.]

The 'Irish' part of our journey was going to be a visit to 'Banna',
another fort-site near Birdoswald. St. Patrick says that he was born in
the 'vicus' of Bannaventae Berniae. This Banna is mentioned in the
Ravenna Cosmography, and it has been suggested that 'Berniae' should be
'Berniciae' - the region north and south of Hadrian's Wall was known as
Bernicia. There wasn't much to see through the rain - certainly no
indication that Birdoswald was trading on its Patrick connections.

So, I took my soggy children home...

It is one of the mysteries of St. Patrick that no place on the island of
Britain seems to have traded on its Patrick connections - compare the
way in which any place with a Patrick connection in Ireland uses that to
increase prestige and encourage pilgrimage. Already by the C7th century
there was doubt about Patrick's birthplace - Muirchu, in his biography,
says that he had established 'beyond doubt' that it was 'Ventre', Venta
Silurum, Caerwent in Wales.

Paddy O'Sullivan
--
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora
Irish-Diaspora list

What I do on my holidays...

Each year I have my designated holiday fun book, carried everywhere with
me to fill the doldrum moments...

Last year it was K.M Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words:
James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, Yale Up, 1977 - which I
recommend to all who love dictionaries. When I came to an exciting bit
I would shout down to the family in the swimming pool, 'He's reached the
letter D!' And every now and again the University (in this case,
Oxford) would appoint yet another committee to enquire into Murray's
slow progress - and yet again poor James Murray would have to go over
the ground rules, which they had such difficulty understanding: that
the purpose of the Dictionary was to describe usage, not prescribe...

This year the holiday book is Anthony Grafton, The Footnote, a Curious
History, Faber and Faber, 1997. A number of times this book has had me
laughing out loud ('You've fine-tuned the footnote to a major networking
device.' p. 13). But it has also helped me look at scholarly practice
across a number of disciplines - and identifies one 'genuine paradox',
which requires 'that one prove both that each sentence is original and
that it has a source.' (p.143)

My own footnotes have been criticised - and it is true that I do have a
regrettable tendency to secrete little Borgesian essays in them. Is it
possible to write a scholarly work that has no footnotes?

Here it is the 'August Bank holiday weekend' - a time when,
traditionally, the English drive to the seaside and sit in cars, eating
fish and chips, whilst the rain cascades down the windscreen. Some
traditions are sacred - so things will be quiet here for the next couple
of days...

Paddy O'Sullivan

--
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora
Irish-Diaspora list

Re: Paddy's holiday reading
Paddy and others interested in dictionary-making might like to follow
Murray's 'Caught in a web of words' (1977) with a book I read this summer:
Simon Winchester's 'The surgeon of Crowthorne: a tale of murder, madness
and the love of words', London:Viking/Penguin, 1998. It's about the
relationship between Murray and one of the OED's most prolific contributors
- a convicted American murderer confined in the English criminal lunatic
asylum of Broadmoor. The book is rather self conscious in its writing
style, but it presents a strange and fascinating story. As for a bizarre
Irish angle: the murderer had a paranoid fear of the Irish who he was
convinced were trying to murder him. This seems to have arisen out of an
incident in which he was called upon to punish an Irish soldier during the
American civil war. I've come across a case in a Lancashire asylum during
the late 19th century of a patient also convinced he was being persecuted
by the Irish - in this instance they were trying to rob rather than murder
him. I wonder if 'Irish paranoia' was a feature of 19th-century English and
American madness. Has anyone else encountered it?

Re: Is Pat O'Farrell a New Zealander?
O'Farrell discusses his own and his family's identity in his
semi-autobiographical 'Vanished kingdoms: the Irish in Australia and New
Zealand' (1990). In the introduction to that he describes himself as an
Irish colonial of New Zealand birth and Australian citizenship - in other
words, his identity is mixed. I don't think he would describe himself as a
New Zealander, pure and simple. As an antipodean of Irish parentage myself,
I understand his attitude. But I'm a second-generation returner who has
lived longer in Ireland and England than I did in Australia - so what does
that make me? I'm certainly not English and I don't feel Australian anymore
and nor am I Irish. I think my identity is more to do with being an
historian, an academic and a woman than with belonging to a particular
nationality. But then I do spend my life studying things Irish!!

Elizabeth Malcolm
Irish Studies/Liverpool

Thomas O'Malley Baines -papal soldier, Feninan, Australian prisoner,
California Kearneyite

From: Patrick Maume.

When working on the MAYO NEWS for the beginning of the twentieth
century some time ago I came across a reprint from the autobiography of
Thomas
C. O'Malley Baines, born in Mayo (his family were evicted during the
Famine).
Baines describes his experiences in the Papal Army. On his return to
Ireland, like
many other Papal veterans, he secured a position on the Dublin Fire Brigade
and
became involved in the IRB. He was arrested & sent out to Western
Australia with
other Fenian convicts on the HOUGOMONT (the last boatload of convicts ever
sent
to Australia - incidentally I am related to another of them, John Sarsfield
Casey
alias "The Galtee Boy"). On his release he went to California, where he
spent the
rest of his life.

The autobiography as published in the MAYO NEWS ends with his arrival in
California, but according to editorial comment he was active in the
California labour
movement known as "Kearneyites" and spent his latter years as a pedler - he
used
to sell his autobiography, which he called MY LIFE IN TWO
HEMISPHERES, in pamphlet form as he travelled around. He was married and
had at least one son. He died in 1899.

I wonder if members of the list can help me on a few points:
(1) Has anyone else made use of this autobiography to your knowledge?
(2) Do you know of any libraries which have the original pamphlet -
perhaps in
California? Does it end where the MAYO NEWS version ends or does it go on
to
cover his activities in California?
(3) Is there any literature on the Kearneyites? I had heard of them
before in
connection with their agitation against Chinese labour which led to
restrictions on
Chinese immigration to California. I remember seeing a Nast cartoon
showing a
Kearneyite pulling a Chinaman by the pigtail. (Incidentally, did you see
the recent
NEW YORKER article on Nast which argued that he was not really anti-Irish or
anti-Catholic but merely opposed to those who fostered divisiveness under
the
pretext of multiculturalism? Take a bow, Baron Munchausen.)
(4) Has anyone got any ideas about where I might be able to publish this
as a
select document? I was thinking of getting it on disk when I have the time
(I'm just
finishing a book, hence the continued delay of my promised account of the
Parnell
Summer School) and seeing if IRISH HISTORICAL STUDIES might be interested.
I'd be grateful for any help received.
Yours sincerely,
Patrick Maume

The American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) has established a
committee of five (Monica Brennan, Kathryn Conrad, Adele Dalsimer, Susan
Harris and Mary Helen Thuente) to 're-evaluate the mission and
procedures of ACIS'.

This committee is to produce a report by October 31 1998.

All members of ACIS have now been sent a copy of the ACIS bylaws, plus a
questionnaire and machine readable 'test form'. It is also possible to
send comments by email to
adhoc-camp[at]news.vill.edu

Though emails and other mailings will not be responded to individually.

As a very distant member of ACIS I am not sure that my views are
directly relevant here. But I do know that some members of ACIS have
expressed disquiet at the low priority given in the past to 'Irish
Diaspora Studies'.

The first question in the re-evaluation committee's questionnaire asks
your opinion of this statement...
'The ACIS mission statement, as stated in section I.A, is adequate.'

In fact, if you read the ACIS bylaws, there is no mention of the Irish
outside Ireland or of Irish Diaspora Studies. You really have to push
the sense of the words to find some niche into which you might put what
we do. Bylaw I.A speaks only of 'Irish Studies', undefined - and you
have to look on, to bylaw II.A, to find some definition of ACIS's
activities and interests - 'aspects of Irish history, literature, the
arts, sociology...' etc. I suppose you could argue that what we do is
an 'aspect' of 'Irish history...' etc.

But would it not be better if ACIS's Mission Statement included a
welcoming acceptance of its members' interest in Irish Diaspora Studies?
And would not a positive interest in Irish Diaspora Studies be welcomed
by ACIS members who are not professional academics?

Patrick O'Sullivan

--
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora
Irish-Diaspora list

From: Patrick Maume

To whom it may concern:

I was reading Rev. Cleary's famous expose of Orangeism, THE ORANGE
SOCIETY recently (produced in Australia in the late 1890s, warning against
the
growth of Orangeism in Australia by reference to the Irish experience).
The author
I think was an Irish priest born in Wexford - anyone got more information
about
him? The book is an useful source of information on the more violent and
discreditable aspects of nineteenth-centruy Orangeism, though marred by the
fact
that it is modelled on other nineteenth-century Catholic condemnations of
secret
societies - i.e. seeing it as being tightly controlled by a small group of
desigining
conspirators at the top, and thus unwilling to treat the rank and file as
anything
more than passive dupes. Thus for example he refers to William Johnston of
Ballykilbeg's defiance of the Party Processions Act without realising that
the official
Orange leadership actually tried to stop Johnston for fear of antagonising
the
government.
One item which particularly struck me was on p.391 of the 1897 edition,
where he
describes anti-Catholic discrimination on Derry and Belfast corporations.
He
complains about the denial of Catholic representation in Derry as shown by
the
defeat of a respectable Catholic merchant in a ward previously represented
by "an
Indian quack doctor of unsavoury reputation, who used to walk in the
Apprentice
Boys' Processions". Anyone know anything about this man? If he was
really an
Indian he must have been one of the earliest non-white elected
representatives in
Ireland. A reminder that Ireland experienced immigration as well as
emigration,
long before the Celtic Tiger ...
Best wishes,
Patrick.




---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1998 07:39:09 -0800
From: Michael Mullan
Reply-To: irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk
To: irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk
Subject: Ir-D Migration & mental health - another perspective

Further to the discussion on health and migration - a report in the Madrid
daily El PaÌs (3 March), headed 'Friendship is the best preventative of
depression', quotes Manuel Trujillo, the Spanish-born head of psychiatry at
Bellevue Hospital, New York, interviewed (by Albor RodrÌguez) at the First
Psychiatric Updating Course organised in Madrid by the Castillo del Pino
Foundation. It might be of interest to those on the Ir-D list interested in
Irish migrant mental health issues. With acknowledgements - (c) El PaÌs
1998 - I offer a partial translation...

Q - Are there mental illnesses directly attributable to the experience
of migration?
A - The immigrant has to deal with stresses arising from the loss of
roots and the barriers of acculturation, that is, he/she has to adapt to new
forms of social behaviour, which means an extra stress factor. In
providing psychiatric services to this part of the community, it is often
the case
that cultural barriers increase the frequency of mis-diagnosis, and of
patient/doctor misunderstandings, so that the treatment response is not
always appropriate. In the USA there are some 180 different migrant
communities, the largest being the Hispanics, who account for 25 per
cent
of those using our services. We have developed a programme which we call
'cultural competency', which tries to identify the features of their
culture and to create a climate in which the patent can feel valued.

Q - Is there any particular mental illness associated with Hispanics?
A - For example, you get some presenting with untypical variants of
conventional disorders; the Hispanic schizophrenic has a different
symptomatic profile. Likewise manic-depressives. The Hispanic patient
with depression is less likely to admit 'I feel sad', which is one of the
indicators of depression, but may instead suffer from somatic
disturbances (physical pains, lethargy, tiredness). There are some
protective
features in Hispanic culture: the emphasis on the family, on unconditional
supportive friendship. But there are aggravating features too, like the
stress women suffer because of male chauvinism.

Q - Could 'emigrant nostalgia' be described as an illness?
A - No, it's a marvellous, natural feeling which serves to maintain
one's link with what has been left behind. It's a gradual mechanism for the
resolution of loss. But if one gets stuck at that point, and is unable
to get over the feeling of mourning, this can lead to illness.

..................................
end

MICHAEL MULLAN
Research writer, public relations unit
University of Bradford, West Yorkshire BD7 1DP, UK
Tel. 01274- 233087 Fax 01274- 235460