The publisher is distributing this sample chapter
Copyright 2000 by Little Brown
More information at http://www.bn.com

excerpt from
*American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the
Nation*
by Adam Cohen Elizabeth Taylor
Format: Hardcover, 608pp.
ISBN: 0316834033
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Pub. Date: May 2000

Chapter 1: A Separate World

Richard Joseph Daley was a product of the bloody world of the Chicago
slaughterhouses.

Chicagoans of his day, both Catholics and non-Catholics, located themselves
by referring to their local parish - they came from Saint Mary's or Saint
Nicholas's. Daley came from Nativity of Our Lord, the parish church of his
childhood, where he would be eulogized seventy-four years later. Nativity was
founded in the mid-1800s to serve the poor Irish-Catholic laborers who were
flooding the area to work in the growing meat-packing industry. The church's
simple stone building stood at the corner of 37th and Union, on the fringes
of the South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport and hard up against a vast
expanse of cattle-slaughtering facilities. Standing on the steps after Mass,
young Daley could smell the fetid mixture of manure and blood that wafted
over from the sprawling Union Stock Yards to the south. The gurgling in the
background was the cackle of "Bubbly Creek," a torpid offshoot of the Chicago
River that got its name from the fermenting animal carcasses and offal in its
slow-moving waters. If Nativity seemed like an unlikely place for spiritual
repose, it had once been worse. The church's first home had actually been in
the former J. McPherson livery stables. The name "Nativity" was a reference
to the fact that the church, like Christ, had been born in a stable - an
attempt to put a holy gloss on grim surroundings. Nativity's new building had
a pleasant interior, including ornate stained-glass windows, but nothing
could make up for the harsh reality of geography. Daley's spiritual home was
located just a few hundred feet from what one parish history called "the
greatest and bloodiest butcher shamble in the world."

The whole city of Chicago had a reputation for coarseness and for lacking the
style and sophistication of older cities like Philadelphia or Boston. "Having
seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again," Rudyard Kipling wrote
after visiting in 1889. "It is inhabited by savages." Chicago was the
industrial capital of the Midwest, a tough town dominated by factories that
belched black smoke. Theodore Dreiser, who roamed the city as a reporter,
marveled in his book Newspaper Days at the "hard, constructive animality" of
the rougher parts of Chicago. It was not uncommon, he found on his rounds, to
come across men standing outside ramshackle homes "tanning dog or cat hides."
The Chicago of this era was a town in which displaced farmhands and
struggling immigrants competed for space in ramshackle tenements and rooming
houses, and hooligans roamed the streets. Block after block of "disorderly
houses" did a brisk business corrupting hordes of guileless young girls, like
Dreiser's Sister Carrie, who arrived daily from small towns in a desperate
search for a better life. And it was Chicago saloonkeepers who invented the
Mickey Finn, a chloral hydrate laced drink slipped to solitary patrons so
they could be easily robbed. "The New York Tenderloin," journalist Lincoln
Steffens wrote, "was a model of order and virtue compared with the badly
regulated, police-paid criminal lawlessness of the Chicago Loop and its
spokes." Chicago's moral climate was shaped by Al Capone and the Saint
Valentine's Day Massacre, and by the ignominy of the 1919 Chicago White Sox -
the team that shocked the nation by fixing the World Series. "Chicago is
unique," journalist A. J. Liebling would conclude after visiting for a year
to research a book. "It is the only completely corrupt city in America."
Loving Chicago, Nelson Algren once said, was like loving a woman with a
broken nose.

Even by the standards of turn-of-the-century Chicago, Daley's neighborhood
was a grim place. It was Chicago's first slum, known in its early days by the
evocative name Hardscrabble. It was settled in the1830s and 1840s by the
Irish "shovelmen" who built the nearby Illinois & Michigan Canal, many
working for whiskey and a dollar a day. The area was renamed Bridgeport in
the 1840s, when a bridge was built across the Chicago River at Ashland
Avenue, forcing barges to unload on one side and reload on the other. When
the canals were completed, Bridgeport's dirty work of canal-building gave way
to the even less savory trade of animal slaughter. Chicago killed and
prepared for market much of the livestock raised in the farm states
surrounding it. Leading the nation in slaughterhouses, it was truly - as Carl
Sandburg observed - "hog butcher for the world." In the mid-1800s, Chicago
slaughterhouses were being forced out of the congested downtown, and they
found the vast expanses south of Bridgeport an ideal place to relocate. The
area had sweeping tracts of open land, and a steady supply of water from the
Chicago River available to use in the slaughtering and treatment processes.
It was also near railroad tracks, which meant that once the cattle arrived
from the countryside, they would not need to be led through the city streets
on their way to the slaughter. In 1865, several slaughterhouses that once
operated in downtown Chicago combined to form the Union Stock Yards, an
enormous collection of meat-processing plants that dominated the area just
south of Bridgeport.

Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle exposed the horrific world of the
Chicago slaughterhouses, captured the unsavory surroundings in which Daley
grew up. There were "so many cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the
world," Sinclair wrote. "The sound of them here was as of all the barnyards
of the universe; and as for counting them - it would have taken all day
simply to count the pens." Young Daley used to watch as the animals were
driven down Archer Avenue to their demise, and he and his friends would gawk
at the remnants that showed up in Bubbly Creek. Thousands of Daley's
neighbors labored in the slaughterhouses, their workdays an uninterrupted
assembly line of killing. Pigs with chains around their hind legs were hooked
to a spoke-less wheel, which hoisted the squealing animals into the air and
carried them by overhead rail across the length of the building, where a man
covered in blood cut their throats by hand. The blood that drained out was
collected for use as fertilizer. Then the hog, often still squirming with
life, was dropped into a vat of boiling water. Cattle were treated no better.
It was hard, dispiriting work. Daley's neighbors were the workers Sinclair
told of, those who fell prey to the chemicals used to pickle meats, which
caused "all the joints" of their fingers to "be eaten by the acid, one by
one." Coming of age in this violent world, Daley was robbed of any illusions
early.

As its original name suggested, Bridgeport was a hardscrabble place. The
neighborhood's earliest residents had lived in wooden shanties along the
Chicago River that sank into the muddy soil of the riverbank. It was a wild
region, where wolves ran free in the early years of Daley's childhood. The
predominant form of housing, after residents gained the wherewithal to move
beyond wooden shanties, was the humble "bungalow," a staple of working-class
Chicago architecture. These long and narrow houses, or "shotgun-shacks,"were
a big step up from the squalid accommodations along the river, but they were
still cheap housing for people who could not afford better. These small
bungalows, on not-much-larger lots, were usually home to large immigrant
families that would have been crowded in twice the space. Years after Daley
was elected mayor, his wife would recall the cramped conditions of her
childhood bungalow, in a neighborhood adjoining Bridgeport. "There were 10
children in our family and we only had one bathroom but somehow we all
managed," Sis Daley told a newspaper reporter cheerfully.

Bridgeport was, as much as any neighborhood in Chicago, a world apart. It lay
on the geographical fringes of the city, five miles from downtown, on land
that had only recently been incorporated. And it was separated on all sides
by imposing barriers: the Chicago River to the north, the stockyards to the
south, Bubbly Creek to the west, and wide railroad tracks - and then a black
ghetto - to the east. Ethnic groups had divided Chicago according to an
unwritten peace treaty.

Germans settled on the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West
Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side and Near Northwest Side,
and blacks in the South Side Black Belt.

Bridgeport was more diverse than most Chicago neighborhoods: it was home to
several different white Catholic immigrant groups. But this only meant that
Bridgeport was itself divided into ethnic enclaves.

Most of its Poles were concentrated in northwest Bridgeport, west of Halsted
Avenue, the traditional boundary line between Irish and non-Irish Bridgeport.
Lithuanians also lived predominantly in the northwest, with Morgan Street
separating them from the Poles.

Germans and Bohemians were more spread out, but they too stayed mainly on the
non-Irish side of Halsted. It is a reflection of how ethnically divided
Bridgeport was that in 1868 the "index of dissimilarity" - the most commonly
used measure of residential segregation - between its Lithuanians and Irish
was .96, indicating almost complete separation. In turn-of-the-century
Bridgeport, a block or two meant a world of difference. Tom Donovan, who
would later become Daley's patronage chief, grew up at 39th and Lowe Avenue,
only a few blocks from Daley's home at 35th and Lowe. But it was one parish
over - Saint Anthony's, rather than Nativity of Our Lord - so, Donovan
insisted, "I didn't grow up in his neighborhood." Even Bridgeport's Irish
were divided up into sub-neighborhoods: the north-west Bridgeport Irish; the
Dashed Irish, who lived along upper Union Avenue, once named Dashed Avenue;
the Canaryville Irish, who lived in the marshy far-south end of the
neighborhood; and, just north of Canaryville, the little rectangle of land
around Nativity of Our Lord Church known as Hamburg.

Daley's deepest loyalties were to this small Irish-Catholic
village-within-a-village. Hamburg was no more than a few square blocks,
stretching from 35th Street down to the stockyards at 39th Street, and
bounded by Halsted Avenue on the west and the railroad tracks along Wentworth
Avenue on the east. Its major institution was Nativity, which like all
Catholic churches of the time was as much a center of communal life as a
place of worship. Archbishop James Quigley, who led the Chicago Archdiocese
from 1903 to 1915, had decreed that "a parish should be of such a size that
the pastor can know personally every man, woman, and child in it,"7 and this
was certainly the case in tiny Nativity Parish. The annual parish fair -
which featured gambling games, booths selling oyster stew, and a Hibernian
band playing in the corner - was almost a family gathering. Hamburg also had
an array of secular institutions tying its residents together. The 11th Ward
offices, headquarters of one of the most important units of the city's
powerful Democratic machine, were located on Halsted Avenue at 37th Street.
Directly across Halsted was the neighborhood saloon, Schaller's Pump, which
many said was the real headquarters of the 11th Ward Democrats. Young
residents had an institution of their own, the Hamburg Athletic Club, a
combination of sports club, adjunct to the political machine, and youth gang.
Hamburg was a tight little world inhabited by people who shared a religion,
an ethnicity, and a common set of values, and who were mistrustful of those
who lacked these bonds. Though it was in the middle of a large city, Hamburg
was "not only a separate neighborhood, but . . . a separate world - a small
town on a compact . . . scale."

By one well-established formulation, a neighborhood is a "place to be
defended." For all its seeming solidity, Irish-Catholic Hamburg was already
in decline even at the time of Daley's birth. Nativity Parish was losing
congregants, declining from 2,800 to 1,200 in the early years of the century,
and beginning to encounter financial troubles. Throughout Daley's childhood,
other ethnic groups were growing in size and drawing closer to Hamburg:
formerly Irish Lawler Avenue, a mere four blocks west of Daley's childhood
home, was renamed "Lithuanica" as the Lithuanian population around it grew.
Mr. Dooley, the fictional creation of the great Irish-American journalist
Finley Peter Dunne, expressed Bridgeport's fears of being engulfed by
fast-encroaching ethnic rivals. In Dunne's columns in the Chicago Daily News,
Mr. Dooley was the Irish-born keeper of a Bridgeport saloon. In 1897, five
years before Daley's birth, Mr. Dooley was already bemoaning the fact that
"th' Hannigans an' Leonidases an' Caseys" were moving out to greener
pastures, "havin' made their pile," and "Polish Jews an' Swedes an' Germans
an' Hollanders" had "swarmed in, settlin' on th' sacred sites." The most
telling sign of Bridgeport's "change an' decay," Mr. Dooley said, was the
selection of "a Polacker" to tend the famous "red bridge," which joined
Bridgeport to the rest of the city, thereby placing control of the
neighborhood in the hands of a non-Hibernian. It was the rising tide of black
immigration, though, that Bridgeporters found most worrisome. Daley's youth
coincided with the start of an unprecedented migration, as southern blacks
moved north to take industrial jobs in the Northeast and Midwest. Most of the
blacks flooding into Chicago were settling in the South Side Black Belt, just
a few blocks east of Bridgeport, and the ghetto was always threatening to
move closer. By the time Daley was born, many Bridgeporters had decided that
their tough little neighborhood, with its workaday bungalows and
slaughterhouse ambience, was best left to the new ethnic groups that were
engulfing it on all sides. Irish residents of Hamburg who had the money -
like Mr. Dooley's Hannigans, Leonidases, and Caseys - were already moving out
to more attractive and prestigious neighborhoods where the lawns were larger
and the air did not smell of blood. But despite all sense and logic, Daley's
family, and later Daley himself, remained intensely loyal to their small
Irish-Catholic village. Daley never moved out and, it might be said, he spent
a lifetime defending it.

Daley was born in a simple two-flat at 3502 South Lowe on May 15, 1902.
Daley's father, Michael, was the second of nine children born to James E.
Daley, a New York?born butcher, and Delia Gallagher, an immigrant from
Ireland. Like most Irish-American immigrants, Daley's forebears came to the
country as part of the Great Potato Famine migration, which caused more than
two million Irish to expatriate between 1845 and 1850. Though not brought
over in chains, these Irishmen and Irishwomen were torn from their land and
forced to emigrate by extraordinarily cruel circumstances. Before the famine
ended, perhaps one-quarter of Ireland's population of eight million had died
of starvation and disease. Many survivors headed for America. Their journey
across the ocean, made in aptly named "coffin ships," was perilous.
Passengers often succumbed to "ship fever," a kind of typhus, along the way.
It was a migration of refugees fleeing a country they held dear, often forced
to leave loved ones behind. Family legend has it that Daley's grandfather
began his own journey when he went to market in Cork with his brother to sell
pigs and, with the few shillings he made on the sale, boarded the next ship
for America.

Growing up in Bridgeport, Daley could not have avoided hearing about the
horrors of the "Great Starvation." Adults in the neighborhood, some of whom
had seen the suffering firsthand, passed on to the children lurid tales of
skeletons walking the countryside, and peasant women dying in the fields.
These famine stories were invariably laced with bitter accounts of how the
hated British had exported wheat and oats out of the country while the Irish
starved. In the course of his childhood, Daley learned the whole tragic
history of his people - the centuries of rule as a conquered territory, the
rebellions brutally put down, the absentee landlordism that drove farmers
into poverty, and the language all but obliterated.
-------------------
The publisher is distributing this sample chapter
Copyright 2000 by Little Brown
More information at http://www.bn.com

John Manton, Nuffield College, Oxford, has asked if we can help with the following
query...

P.O'S.


Subject: Religious Filmmaking

Forwarded on behalf of John Manton
john.manton[at]nuffield.oxford.ac.uk

I am working on Irish Catholic medical missionaries in Africa since World
War Two, and am currently looking at a film made for the Medical
Missionaries of Mary in 1948 by Andrew Buchanan, an English producer.

I'd like to know if anyone has come across bodies, groups or individuals
concerned with religious filmmaking in the 1930s and 1940s (more
specifically Catholic, and Irish, but since the technical and intellectual
contexts of the topic are broader, any general discussion on the topic will
be of relevance).

Although I know the links between Irish missionaries and American Catholics
were strong in the 1950s, I'm not sure how much American discussions
immediately post - Vigilanti Cura impinged in Ireland. I'd be curious to
find out...

Thanks in advance,
John
----------------------------------------------------
John Manton

Nuffield College,
New Rd.,
Oxford OX1 1NF,
England, U.K.=09

+44 (0)1865 278658 (with voicemail)

From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Dymphna=20Lonergan?=
Subject: Re: Ir-D Corruption in Irish politics

This is probably not an answer to the question, but my
understanding of Irish politics was made clearer to me
when I learned that, unlike in Australia, Irish local
government councillors are also State politicians.
This explained the apparently haphazard approach to
highways where local politicians' influences were
evident in whether a town had a by-pass or double lane
highway (Kinnegad was mentioned as an
example).Concerned with local issues, politicians
would find it difficult to develop a big picture
approach, with the ensuing policy development,
standards, best practice etc. Concern with local
issues isolates the politician. She is answerable
primarily to the local people, not to the people in
general and not to her government. Corruption is
inevitable with that amount of power and lack of
accountability.
This is not to say that Australians are free from
corruption of course!

Dymphna Lonergan
The Flinders University of South Australia
Dymphna_1[at]Yahoo.com

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The following review article has fallen into our nets...

P.O'S.


Frank Neal Black '47
Ian McBride The Siege of Derry
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO IRISH HISTORY Edited by S.J. Connolly

Source: History Today
Date: 08/1998

Citation Information: (v48 n8) Start Page: p57(2) ISSN: 0018-2753
Author(s): Pearce, Edward


Orange, Green and Black
`Why' someone asked lan Paisley, `quarrel with Catholics? Aren't we all children of God?'
`We are not children of God,' he replied with terrible brio. 'We are the children of
wrath!'

The Catholic Irish 150 years ago would have agreed. Frank Neal's Black '47 concerns the
treatment of Famine victims in flight to Britain. James Salter, relieving officer at
Newport (Mon) is cited. `The Keene family arrived at Newport from Bantry, man, wife and
five children. In Salter's words, they were emaciated, and Keene himself said they were
literally starving. Salter sent the family to the [Poor Law] union Hospital, 150 yards
from his office but before the family reached the hospital one of the children died.'

Black '47 is a work of enormous scholarship recounting unbearable misery. It is rich in
murderous statistics; `in 1848 Merthyr Tydfil relieved 1,346 Irish paupers, Cardiff 2,063,
Bristol 4,403 while Newport relieved 12,661. Meanwhile in Liverpool in the Vauxhall,
Exchange and St George's districts, all Irish immigration centres, deaths from fever
during 1848 were one in respectively 17, 21 and 22, against the one in 228 recorded in
select Rodney Street.'

Gateshead `had been sending fever patients to the Newcastle fever hospital now refusing to
take any more. The only building available to Gateshead for renting as a fever shed, was
over the union border in Chester-le-Street.' The Poor Law commissioners granted permission
`and the shed was leased for a year thereby increasing the costs of the union.' The
Glasgow Chronicle says in January 1847 that unchecked Irish immigration would `ultimately
corrode the vitals of society and render property almost valueless in all the hives of
industry.'

Mr Neal's conclusion is measured and sombre. Cities and towns were dealing with a national
crisis out of the rates, and central government left them to it. Their threats to invoke
the law for removal of vagrants `did not stop pauper immigration, but did force many Irish
into even more desperate poverty... They were not generous but they were not generous to
the British poor.' A splendid, dark and compelling book.

Northern Ireland Protestants attract little sympathy and less understanding, seeming self
pre-occupied in ways that make Yorkshire seem cosmopolitan. Their obsessive historical
event has been traced by Ian McBride in The Siege of Derry with scrupulous compression,
saying much in the small space of its effective, but grotesquely priced, 81 pages.

Ulster Protestants speak a Boy's Own Paper language -- Union Jack, Queen, nation -- yet
are alone and unloved. The British are probably more alienated by Protestant rant than by
truly fearful IRA crime. You have to remind yourself that lan Paisley has neither murdered
nor procured murder. Nice Mr Adams has, but a friend visiting Downing Street was invited
`to meet Gerry'. Yet ironically, the title Nationalist zealots adapted applies perfectly
to Protestant thinking -- Ourselves Alone... Sinn Fein!

But it wasn't always so. The Conservative Party has an evil record of stirring up
Protestant and Unionist zealotry in the province. Lord Randolph Churchill told an Ulster
Hall audience `You are the only people in Ireland we, the English, recognise. For you,
like us, are a dominant and imperial caste.' Between 1886 and 1914 British MPs and/or
peers denied Ireland devolution guaranteed against clerical power, avoidance of the
suicidal protection that a violently liberated Ireland would inflict on herself, the
vengeful and gerrymandered petty despotism of Stormont... and all those deaths!

Mr McBride mines complexities behind the Ulster Protestant mentality. The shutting of the
gates of Londonderry was long the subject of wrangling reminiscence between Anglicans and
Presbyterians. George Walker, an Anglican cleric, rushed back to the mainland with a
pamphlet to collect congratulatory addresses and honorary degrees. Counter-pamphlets would
denounce him as a credit-hogger, but Walker sealed his credit by getting himself killed at
the Boyne. He got the statue and Anglicans continued persecuting Presbyterians,
stimulating successive emigrations to the American colonies. We mock the parochial,
self-serving word, `Loyalist'. Yet the Maiden City, whose inhabitants ate rats in defence
of the Glorious Revolution, finding itself in debt for garrison wages, arms purchases and
enemy looting, was cheated of compensation by successor governments. A thirty-year
campaign by the city's agent, Hamil, ended with his imprisonment for debt.

The ceremony of re-enacting the siege, with Governor Lundy burned in effigy, was described
as ancient in 1772, yet took variable forms. In 1915, Ulster regiments burned two statues
of Lundy on the Western Front where they were dying in fearful numbers while asserting
their `dominant and imperial status'. Yet during the 1789 centenary, and with radical
feeling high, Catholic clergy actually took part in the ceremony. Irony abounds though. By
1797 the gates were being shut in earnest every night as a curfew when insurrection in the
north western counties was expected daily. And Protestant economic success would draw in
Catholic peasantry from Co. Donegal till Londonderry had to be gerrymandered to stay
`loyal'.

The Oxford Companion to Irish History (great value for its 600 pages) and coping with
everything Irish, Ladies' Land League, Sean Lemass and the Legion of Mary, also
accommodates Lundy, Linen, Lame (guns of) and naturally Lloyd George. For Londonderry it
says, reasonably enough, `See Derry.' Though its eighty-seven contributors do not include
such revisionists as Paul Bew, George Boyce or Roy Foster, this fine book of reference, is
admirably fair, defining its own scruple in the entry on Alexander Sullivan from whom
Irish schoolboys took the historical certainties of the De Valera era: `His Story of
Ireland (1870) is a myth-making classic. New Ireland (1877) reflects the more open-minded
attitude that he developed while living in London as an MP...'.

The civil entry on Balfour, Arthur damns by inadvertence. `He introduced "perpetual"
coercion legislation in 1887. But he was also associated with what came to be known as
"constructive unionism", establishing the Congested Districts Board, 1981, and supporting
proposals for a Catholic university. Intellectually, he despised nationalism; but he
probably despised Ulster Unionism too, but gave it pragmatic respect especially after the
devolution crisis. He expected Irish independence to come and... supported Lloyd George's
abortive home rule proposals in 1916 arid the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921.' But then
Balfour despised most things.

Adams and Paisley have no entries while Crawford, Frederick Hugh, bringer of guns to Larne
and prospective kidnapper of Gladstone, is gently treated. We are not told of his
preference for the German High Command in Dublin over any administration of Irish
Catholics. His doings are plainly listed and this God-bothering Edwardian Captain Marvel
described factually as `one of the most influential militant unionists of the home rule
era.'

Little ironies creep under the scholarly blinds. So cricket `first recorded as being
played in Ireland in August 1792', is included. We learn that `the Land War soured
relations between playing tenantry and sponsoring landlords' and that, in the morose way
of zealotry, `the Gaelic Athletic Association's ban on "foreign games" further reduced
popular support'. But the conclusion is sublime; `Though an Irish national team defeated
the West Indies at Sion Mills Co. Tyrone in 1969, this result was entirely
unrepresentative.'

Occasionally, one wants to quibble in an English context. I would not call George Wyndham
`a colourful liberal Tory'. Wyndham functioned some of the the time in a liberal way in
Ireland before drink and breakdown got to him, but he was an antisemite and Diehard who
described the Parliament Act of 1911 as `the vote given by the House of Lords for
Revolution -- owing to Unionist abstentions and acts of treachery.' But given the
ministerial attitudes to Ireland which Frank Neal describes, Wyndham might well pass as
liberal ... in British Ireland.


COPYRIGHT 1998 History Today Ltd. (UK)

The following review article has also fallen into our nets...

P.O'S.


Title: Hart, The I.R.A. and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923
Ernie O'Malley. IRA Intellectual, by Richard English

Source: The English Historical Review
Date: 02/2000
Citation Information: (ISSN: 0013-8266), Vol. 115 No. 460 Pg. 246
Author(s): SENIA PASETA
Document Type: Article

The I.R.A. and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923.

The I.R.A. and its Enemies. Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923, by Peter Hart
(Oxford: Clarendon P., 1998; pp. xv+350. 40 [pounds sterling]) and Ernie O'Malley. IRA
Intellectual, by Richard English (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1998; pp. xii+267. 25 [pounds
sterling]), are two recent contributions to an expanding literature on the historical and
ideological development of republicanism in twentieth-century Ireland. Hart and English
have succeeded both in presenting intimate and illuminating studies of particular
mind-sets and in displaying the impact of such mind-sets on the evolution of Irish
political life in the twentieth century. The many students and scholars of Irish history
who have looked forward to the publication of Peter Hart's The I.R.A. and its Enemies will
not be disappointed by this innovative and brilliant book. This is first-class historical
writing: the book is superbly researched, constantly provocative and ultimately
persuasive. It will certainly, and deservedly, occupy a central place in modern Irish
historiography and in the broader historiography of the impact on communities of war,
revolution and violence. Hart is not afraid of tackling controversial and often shadowy
aspects of Ireland's recent past (the recent debate in the Irish Times about Hart's
analysis of the Kilmichael ambush is testimony to the continuing ability of recent Irish
history to touch raw nerves). The first chapter describes the killing in 1920 of Sergeant
James O'Donoghue, and introduces the author's intention to delve deeply into the
motivations and experiences of men and women on both `sides' of the early
twentieth-century Anglo-Irish and Irish Civil Wars. Part IV -- `Neighbours and Enemies' --
is a marvellously compact and evocative exploration of the fate of some of the men and
women who were deemed dangerous or suspect and consequently singled out for punishment of
one form or another by the IRA and its supporters. Hart provides a detailed breakdown of
the social, religious and political backgrounds of such people and his conclusions are
chilling: retribution, vendettas and frank prejudice contributed to a culture of violence
and mutual suspicion which tore apart a community and in the process exposed the fragility
of the established social order. This close examination of the impact of violence on one
community is both new and arresting, for it exposes a world and a past which have until
very recently belonged almost exclusively to the victims and the perpetrations of
violence. While gathering evidence and attempting to interview witnesses, Hart was clearly
faced by a wall of silence; his greatest achievement is his success in penetrating this
wall and revealing the way in which considerations of class, religion and respectability
often overrode obvious political divisions in the identification of victims and enemies.
Hart has achieved a masterly balance between detailed archival research, memoir, interview
and folk memory, and has set a very high standard for modern Irish historians. He could
perhaps have related developments in County Cork to the wider Irish situation in more
detail. Cork was -- as he explains -- the most violent of all Irish counties during the
revolutionary period, but it cannot be seen to be representative of the country as a
whole. I would have liked more discussion of what made it different, but this is a minor
criticism of an extraordinary book.

One of the most intriguing and important Irish republicans of the modern period, Ernie
O'Malley, has long cried out for a biographer. A literate man, O'Malley corresponded
widely and produced two volumes of fascinating autobiography which illuminate Irish life
and politics in the twentieth century. Armed with such material, English has endeavoured
to write a `respectful, but not hagiographical' biography, and he has succeeded in this
task. The book is well researched and well written, and no reader will fail to gain from
it a fuller understanding of this complex and unusual man. English's structure is unusual;
chapters are arranged thematically rather than chronologically and very little information
is supplied about O'Malley's early life. This is disappointing, as his early experiences
are too briefly passed over and too loosely described in terms of O'Malley's eventual
republicanism. There is little sense of how O'Malley the child interacted with his
environment and still less about his family life. One of English's strengths, however, is
his ability to shift the focus of the book and the life away from narrowly Irish
considerations; his discussion of O'Malley's travels in America and Mexico add much to our
understanding of the man as both a politician and a writer. Readers who expect a biography
which is overwhelmingly dedicated to tracing and describing O'Malley's political
activities may well be disappointed. Few historians of modern Ireland are better qualified
than English to write about Irish politics in the first half of the twentieth century, and
his analysis of O'Malley's politics is superb, but, like Hart, English has also explored
to great effect some unusual and less well-known aspects of his subject. Such an original
approach marks both books out as worthy and important additions to modern Irish
historiography. They will be read and re-read by specialists, students and general readers
and will undoubtedly provoke both lively debate and new and important research.


COPYRIGHT 2000 Addison Wesley Longman Higher Education

For Basil Walsh...

Subject: Re: Ir-D Catherine Hayes: The Hibernian Prima Donna
From: Eileen A Sullivan

Dear Basil,

Congratulations on the book launch.

I will be in Ireland from Aug3-31. It is remotely possible that I may be
able to get to Limerick for the 30th, leaving early the 31st.

Please send details.

Dr. Eileen A. Sullivan, Director
The Irish Educational Association, Inc. Tel # (352) 332
3690
6412 NW 128th Street E-Mail :
eolas1[at]juno.com
Gainesville, FL 32653

From: Email Patrick O'Sullivan


We were talking about Kipling...

And Kim...

Not - granted - on the Ir-D list...

1.
The article which I recalled from The Irish Sword was...
Rev. J. J. W. Murphy, 'Kipling and the Irish Soldier in India', Irish Sword, IX, 37,
Winter 1970, pp 318-329.

The article is very much of its period (and really of an earlier period), and it is
MILITARY history. It touches on Kim, but looks more at Kipling's other Irishmen - for
example, Kipling's respect for the Soldiers Three, Mulvaney (Irish), Learoyd (Yorkshire)
and Ortheris (London). There is also a Kipling short story, The Mutiny of the
Mavericks' - which seemingly makes use of "Le Caron's" evidence to the Parnell Commission.

2.
Kipling studies now go all over the place. I came across this fun item - Sharon
Hamilton's essay rings all the right post-modern, etc. bells. And is maybe a footnote to
Kim. It even pauses to wonder why the Burmese girl has a banjo - hardly the Burmese
national instrument. (Though I think she's wrong there... I think the suggestion in the
song is that Kipling's narrator would have called any small, stringed instrument a
'banjo'.)

Title: Musicology as propaganda in Victorian theory and practice.

Summary: The concept of music as imperialist propaganda is criticized through an analysis
of the words written by Rudyard Kipling in the song "On The Road To Mandalay." The song
tells of a British soldier who returns to Burma after a few years' stay in England and
starts a romantic relationship with a native girl.

Source: Mosaic (Winnipeg)
Date: 06/1998
Subject(s): Musicology--Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Imperialism--Music; Propaganda,
British--Analysis

Citation Information: (v31 n2) Start Page: p35(22) ISSN: 0027-1276
Author(s): Hamilton, Sharon
Copyright Holder: 1998, Mosaic (Canada)
Document Type: Article

3.
Kipling does, I think, have a special relationship with Irish Diaspora Studies - as, yes,
a spokesman for the Empire in which the Irish were so active. There is also his History
of the Irish Guards in the Great War - which can be read as a father's homage to his dead
son. And - J. J. W. Murphy suggests - a tacit admission that his earlier self had made
misjudgements. Has anyone written on John Ford and Kipling?

So... Those of us who do like Kipling - I am a great admirer of his short story
technique - do have our problems with his works. For example, what can you say about
'Mary Postgate'?

P.O'S.


- --

- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 284 1580
Fax International +44 870 284 1580

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

We have been asked to circulate this message on behalf of Aingeala Flannery...

The subject, 'Irish-Speaking navigators', is a bit confusing - do they mean St. Brendan?
But no, it is posh for 'navvies'...

P.O'S.

From: aingeala and josh [mailto:flannbar[at]indigo.ie]
Subject: IRISH SPEAKING NAVIGATORS

Akajava Films is making a documentary on Irish Navvies in association with
TV 4. I am the researcher on this project. The film will be an exploration
of the lives of the Irish navvies who emigrated (or migrated seasonally) to
England in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.

Our documentary will examine the hardships, work, living and social
conditions of these people. It will address the contribution that these
workers made to the Irish economy in the money that they sent back, and how
it has gone unacknowledged. We want to trace these people, and see where
their lives are now, whether they are successful, have fond memories or are
bitter at having been displaced and forgotten.

The principle characters in our documentary must be IRISH SPEAKERS. We are
seeking out these hard working men, especially characters who have
interesting stories to tell. We are also very interested in meeting the
women who went into service in England during these decades, or women who
were the wives, girlfriends, landladies of Irish labourers.

If any of this strikes a chord with you, please contact me at Akajava.

Aside from meeting with people, would be very interested in finding the
following:
Old photographs, navvie songs, Seanós recordings, boat tickets, newspaper
articles, film footage, radio footage, books, poetry, all types of
memorabilia dating from this period.

We need to have most of our research at hand over the next week, so I would
be very grateful for speedy replies. Thanks for your help, all information
and leads are much appreciated.

Aingeala Flannery
TEL: AKAJAVA FILMS 00-353-1-662 0951
MOBILE: 00-353-87-638 2090
EMAIL akajava[at]tinet.ie
flannbar[at]indigo.ie

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Those of us who only know the standard stories about Joseph Foveaux have now been put on
the right track by Anne-Maree Whitaker's new book...

(All I could recall of Foveaux was the treatment of the Irish 'rising' in Norfolk Island,
and the manner of his acquiring a wife... Anne-Maree bit my head off.)

For details of the new book see the University of New South Wales Press website:

http://www.unswpress.com.au/newa.html

Joseph Foveaux
Power and Patronage in Colonial New South Wales
Anne-Maree Whitaker

'In this gripping biography, Anne-Maree Whitaker uncovers the role of Joseph Foveaux, a
neglected and sometimes unfairly criticised key figure in the development of the colony of
New South Wales.'



- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 284 1580
Fax International +44 870 284 1580

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From: Patrick Maume
Subject: Re: Ir-D Religious Filmmaking

From: Patrick Maume
Fr. R.S. Devane SJ wrote a pamphlet in the late 1940s calling for an
Irish film industry as an antidote to the undesirable attitude
inculcated by foreign (especially American) films. (He had campaigned
actively for film censorship in the 1920s.) There was quite a lot of
commentary by some irish Cahtolic groups on the Hollywood purges of
the 1940s, often with anti-semitic connotations. (Fr. Denis Fahey's
MARIA DUCE was particularly associated with this. Jim Kemmy's
LIMERICK ANTHOLOGY includes a couple of letters to local papers by the
Maria Ducemember and future IRA martyr Sean South which denounce
Hollywood as run by Jewish Communists.)
Many missionary magazines in the postwar decade (such as THE WORD
- - which I think was run by the Holy Ghost Fathers and THE FAR EAST)
made extensive use of high-quality photojournalism and often published
film reviews. These might be a good source for information on
missionary films as well as attitudes to the wider film industry. A
lot of these journals can be consulted in the National Library of
Ireland or the Central Catholic Library in Merrion Square.
The late Fr. Joe Dunn of the RTE RADHARC programme (which can be
seen as developing from this traditon of films about the mission
fields) published a memoir called NO TIGERS IN AFRICA -this might be
worth a look.
A lot of these films would have been shown in parish halls &c round
the country rather than through commercial cinemas. I'm not sure how
this can be traced - maybe the IRish Film Centre in Temple Bar, Dublin
could help. Their film archive might have some examples of these
films.
Best wishes,
Patrick

On Wed 21 Jun 2000 10:00:00 +0000 irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk wrote:

> From:irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk> Date: Wed 21 Jun 2000 10:00:00
+0000
> Subject: Ir-D Religious Filmmaking
> To: irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk
>
>
>
>
> John Manton, Nuffield College, Oxford, has asked if we can help with
the following
> query...
>
> P.O'S.
>
>
> Subject: Religious Filmmaking
>
> Forwarded on behalf of John Manton
> john.manton[at]nuffield.oxford.ac.uk
>
> I am working on Irish Catholic medical missionaries in Africa since
World
> War Two, and am currently looking at a film made for the Medical
> Missionaries of Mary in 1948 by Andrew Buchanan, an English
producer.
>
> I'd like to know if anyone has come across bodies, groups or
individuals
> concerned with religious filmmaking in the 1930s and 1940s (more
> specifically Catholic, and Irish, but since the technical and
intellectual
> contexts of the topic are broader, any general discussion on the
topic will
> be of relevance).
>
> Although I know the links between Irish missionaries and American
Catholics
> were strong in the 1950s, I'm not sure how much American discussions
> immediately post - Vigilanti Cura impinged in Ireland. I'd be
curious to
> find out...
>
> Thanks in advance,
> John
> ----------------------------------------------------
> John Manton
>
> Nuffield College,
> New Rd.,
> Oxford OX1 1NF,
> England, U.K.=09
>
> +44 (0)1865 278658 (with voicemail)
>

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

The Irish Empire documentary film series did use some film sequences of missions in
Africa, we assume of Irish missions. And did address debates about the missions.

There is information at
http://www.littlebird.ie/empire/intro.htm

But, in the manner of a certain style of film-making - more interested in montage than
scholarly sources - the series told us nothing about the origins of these film sequences.

But enquiries at Littlebird might be productive.

P.O'S.

- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

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Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Patrick O'Sullivan

Some Irish-Diaspora list Housekeeping items...

1.
Trouble at mill...

The Computer Centre at the University of Bradford is coping with the recent disaster. And
we must thank everyone there for their hard work.

For new readers... The Computer Centre was burgled and valuable equipment was stolen -
including email and Web servers. Apparently there is an organised gang, which has already
attacked the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester...

The Computer Centre has asked us to not overload the system now in place - which they
describe as 'lashed together'. We must imagine something made of barrels, and spars, and
lengths of rope...


I was in any case going to bring the following points to Ir-D members attention...

2.
'...searching for the shoals of error...'

We are getting shoals of error messages back from the email addresses of some
Irish-Diaspora list members.

So, yes, I can report that some of you are having email/Web problems. And indeed some of
you may not see this message.

Looking at the error messages...

Many are from academic and other institutions. Whose computer teckies often do, at this
time of year, interrupt the system to clean out the pipes. Or something. There is
nothing much we can do about that.

Some of the error messages look like the old holiday period, overcrowded inbox problem.
Do try to negotiate enough space with your email supplier. If your email inbox is full,
Ir-D messages simply get bounced back to us.

3.
There is a procedure for ending your membership of the Irish-Diaspora list, and rejoining
at a later date. I will post the standard message about that procedure.

But generally we find that Ir-D list members do not use that procedure - we seem to like
Ir-D messages piling up, to be read at leisure.

4.
Mildly Desperate Plea
I was anyway going to post a plea to the Irish-Diaspora list, as the (northern hemisphere)
holiday period gets under way.

If you do set up some email automatic response, or holiday procedure, do pause and think
about its effects on other people, especially the Irish-Diaspora list. For example, we
have had people who set up automatic procedures that responded to EVERY Irish-Diaspora
list message by sending an email to the Irish-Diaspora list. Every one of these emails
had to be unpacked - in case it was a genuine Irish-Diaspora list message.

We are MOSTLY easy going about all this. Our response depends on my mood, and on how much
I can legitimately ask of volunteer helpers.

We do reserve the right to delete from the Irish-Diaspora list email addresses that are
giving us an inordinate amount of trouble.

5.
If you have any Ir-D list problems, doubts or queries, always feel free to contact me
directly, at...
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Or (outside the University of Bradford system)...
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

P.O'S.


- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 284 1580
Fax International +44 870 284 1580

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Patrick O'Sullivan

If you are going to be away from your computer for some
time - on holiday for example - and you do not want Irish-Diaspora list
messages to accumulate in your absence, you can send this message

unsubscribe irish-diaspora
end

to majordomo[at]bradford.ac.uk

For those with multiple email addresses... Note that the message needs
to come FROM the email address through which you are known to the Irish-
Diaspora list.

You will then need to rejoin the Irish-Diaspora list when you return.

In fact - we can report from experience - it turns out that no one
ever unsubscribes from the Irish-Diaspora list when they go on holiday.
We all seem to like to let the Ir-D messages pile up.

But see my earlier message, about problems caused to us here in Bradford by overfull email
Inboxes and automatic procedures....

P.O'S.


- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 284 1580
Fax International +44 870 284 1580

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

The re-negotiation of 'Britishness' continues...

Reviewed for H-Albion by Keith Robbins
Norman Davies. _The Isles: A History_. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000. xliii + 1222 pp. Tables, maps,
illustrations, bibliography and index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-19-513442-7.
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=26421959366526

'It is no accident that confronted with the admitted difficulties surrounding the word
"British" he abandons it completely in his title. Other islands around the world might
find the use of the definite article somewhat presumptuous...'

Thus 'The Isles' in question are the 'British Isles' - or, if you will, the North West
European Archipelago...

P.O'S.


- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

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Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
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Yorkshire
England

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

I am going to forward to the Irish-Diaspora list - as two emails - two items from the
electronic journal, Reviews in History:
Paul O'Leary's review of Don MacRaild's collection...

Donald M. MacRaild (ed.)
The Great Famine and Beyond:
Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2000, pp. xii, 303.

and Don MacRaild's reply.

P.O'S.

- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

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Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

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Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Forwarded with permission....
>
>Reviews in History
>
>Donald M. MacRaild (ed.)
>The Great Famine and Beyond:
>Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
>Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2000, pp. xii, 303.
>
>Reviewed by: Dr. Paul O'Leary
>Lecturer, Dept. of History and Welsh History
>University of Wales Aberystwyth.
>
>
>This is a timely and necessary book after nearly a quarter of a century
>during which a steady stream of specialist monographs and articles on
>Irish communities in individual British towns and cities has appeared.
>Even if Irish migration to Britain has not yet become the academic
>industry which is the fate of the Irish in America, there has,
>nevertheless, been a proliferation of studies on themes such as migrants'
>settlement patterns, changes in family structures, religious behaviour and
>beliefs, education, criminality, political institutions and sport. When
>topics such as anti-Irish violence, anti- Catholicism and racial
>stereotypes of the Irish are included, it becomes clear that the field has
>not been lacking in scholarly attention. The extent and variety of this
>literature has contributed to a feeling that the field is ripe for
>stock-taking and re- assessment, and in recent years several scholars
>(including Don MacRaild, the editor of this volume, and Graham Davis) have
>written extremely valuable one-volume syntheses of this research. The
>essays published here make an original and stimulating addition to this
>process of re- appraisal and also contribute to a re-orientation of
>research interests.
>
>In broad terms, the essays can be categorised under the following
>headings: (i) historiographical surveys of the field; (ii) studies which
>employ the comparative perspective with other branches of the Irish
>Diaspora; and (iii) contributions which raise methodological questions
>about the study of migrant groups.
>
>Historiographical surveys by two historians who have themselves edited
>three key collections of essays on the Irish in Britain set the scene. In
>an authoritative summation of the existing corpus of historical writing,
>Roger Swift identifies three broad questions which have dominated debate:
>Why did the Irish migrate and settle in particular districts of Great
>Britain? How were they perceived and why did attitudes change? To what
>extent did they integrate and was a distinctive ethnic identity preserved?
>This volume makes significant contributions to answering the first and
>second of these questions.
>
>In a complementary essay, Sheridan Gilley's lucid survey of the
>historiography of Irish Catholicism in England is prefaced by a combative
>passage attacking those social historians who approach the study of
>religion from a secular point of view. This is an important point, even if
>its impact will be somewhat muted by the intemperate manner in which it is
>expressed. It is widely accepted that religion played a larger part in the
>lives of Irish migrants than it did in the lives of the other inhabitants
>of English towns and cities (the situation in Scotland and Wales, neither
>of which are discussed in this essay, was somewhat different). However,
>the difficulty for historians of religion is that Irish attendance at
>places of worship was low when compared with patterns of religious
>practice in post-Famine Ireland. Consequently, Gilley's insistence on the
>importance of priestly authority in migrant communities in Britain needs
>severe qualification. The present reviewer's research in Catholic
>archives in Wales indicates that clerical authority was frequently
>challenged by Irish lay men and women, especially when the priest was
>considered to have stepped outside his `proper' sphere of influence. The
>politicisation of denominational education following the inception of
>state education in 1870 and the public support expressed by some priests
>for the Conservative Party is an important factor here. By overtly
>participating in political life, the priest left himself open to being
>challenged on secular grounds. Gilley does not deny the possibility of a
>social history of religion - in fact, he has been a notable contributor to
>it in his pioneering studies of Irish Catholicism in London - but most
>social historians would agree that theological notions of clerical
>authority are problematic and should not be allowed to delimit the
>boundaries of historical research.
>
>One of the remarkable facts to emerge from these surveys of the field is
>that few historians have made explicit comparisons between the Irish in
>different parts of the globe. However, among the intriguing aspects of
>this book is the way in which it demonstrates how a notion of an `Irish
>Diaspora' has taken root in recent years (see Donald Akenson, The Irish
>Diaspora: A Primer, 1992, and the invaluable collaborative venture The
>Irish World Wide, six vols., 1992-7, ed. Patrick O'Sullivan). The concept
>has rapidly become an established part of the mental furniture of writers
>in the field, whereas previously it would have been an exotic and
>unfamiliar description to apply to the scattering of Irish migrants around
>the globe. The reasons for the emergence of the term are complex and have
>been much debated by scholars, but it implies a globalising perspective,
>encompassing the Irish communities in Australasia, South America and South
>Africa, as well as those in Britain and North America. To differing
>extents this globalising perspective informs a number of the contributions
>to this volume.
>
>In a perceptive essay, Donald MacRaild argues that migration history is a
>particular beneficiary of comparative methodologies because the phenomenon
>links countries and continents. Taking the Atlantic world as the context
>of his essay, he delineates both the commonalties of Irish experiences on
>both sides of the pond (such as Orangeism and anti- Catholicism), as well
>as the key differences (such as the salience of race in American life and
>its comparable absence from the process of locating the Irish in British
>life). This wide-ranging chapter will be the essential starting point for
>those who wish to pursue the comparative dimension to Irish migration more
>generally and it provides an excellent context for two of the essays which
>follow.
>
>In his closely argued and sophisticated study of Liverpool's Irish
>`enclave', John Belchem makes comparisons between `the two most Irish
>cities in the world', Liverpool itself and New York. Here, again, race is
>identified as one of the key factors differentiating the contexts within
>which the Irish in the two cities lived and worked. According to Belchem,
>the aim of ethnic Irish middle-class mobilisation in Liverpool was to gain
>the recognition of the host society; this was a failure because the host
>population saw it as emphasising Irish apartness. By contrast, the
>Irish-Americans successfully entered the mainstream by means of their
>ethnic mobilisation, thus enjoying the `wages of whiteness'. This is a
>thesis of seminal importance with far-reaching consequences for
>understanding the processes of Irish integration and separation in British
>society.
>
>If it is the structural differences between the Irish on either side of
>the Atlantic which impresses John Belchem, it is the institutional
>similarities which emerge from Alan O'Day's sure-footed comparison of the
>United Irish League of Great Britain and the United Irish League of
>America between 1900 and 1914. Nationalist politics pervaded all branches
>of the Irish Diaspora at least since the emergence of the revolutionary
>Fenian movement in the 1860s. The received wisdom is that nationalism was
>more eagerly embraced by those who migrated to America than by their
>compatriots in Britain, distance and the feeling of exiledom making the
>political heart beat fonder and faster. However, Alan O'Day reaches the
>initially somewhat surprising conclusion that after 1900, when the Home
>Rule question appeared to be moving towards its final resolution, both
>movements suffered from acute difficulties in mobilising the Irish
>community. Drawing on studies of ethnic mobilisation in eastern Europe he
>explains this result in terms of the relatively limited ethnicity of
>migrants.
>
>Taken together, these studies indicate that the comparative mode has the
>potential to yield important new insights into the experience of the Irish
>in Britain. There are already indications of the kind of perspectives and
>debates which such an enterprise might engender: Belchem's and O'Day's
>essays demonstrate that a comparison between the Irish in Britain and
>America (and by implication other branches of the Diaspora) must address a
>combination of the contextual factors influencing ethnic mobilisation as
>well as the internal dynamics of the group. To be successful, such an
>enterprise would need to recognise the diversity of migrant experiences
>within both countries and possibly the ways in which similarities in some
>domains of social life are matched by stark contrasts in others. It would
>be instructive to compare not only the larger cities, like Liverpool and
>New York, but also the smaller ports and industrial towns, as well as the
>coalfields and other mining settlements. Irish participation in the armed
>forces of different countries might also yield intriguing insights. The
>slight literature on the history of Irish women in Britain would certainly
>benefit from comparison with the more developed literature on Irish women
>in the United States. Here is one notable area where this book establishes
>new perspectives and outlines fresh research agendas for the future.
>
>Four essays in the volume raise important methodological questions about
>the study of Irish migrant communities in mid-nineteenth century British
>cities. From very different perspectives, each one tackles questions about
>Irish settlement patterns, associational networks and migrant social
>organisation. In a well-crafted essay on the Irish in Newcastle upon Tyne,
>Frank Neal reports what he modestly describes as the `interim' findings of
>a project on the north-east of England. Based primarily on data culled
>from the census enumerators' books for 1851, his essay starts from the
>premise that `the establishment of parameters regarding size, spatial
>distribution, occupational profile and the principal demographic features
>of the Irish migrants is a necessary but not sufficient condition for
>undertaking a fuller investigation of the growth and nature of Irish
>settlements in any area'. He reveals the importance of chain migration
>from the north-west coast of Ireland to Newcastle and establishes the
>importance of extended families, lodgers and visitors for bolstering
>immigrants' income levels. His research also confirms the findings of
>studies on other British towns which emphasise that the Irish did not
>inhabit ghettos. On the evidence of this essay the larger study of the
>Irish in the north-east of England planned by Frank Neal promises to be a
>major addition to the historiography of the Irish in Britain.
>
>Neal recognises the importance of utilising sources other than the census
>if a fuller picture of Irish communal life is to be drawn, a point which
>other contributors pursue. One avenue with considerable potential in this
>respect is suggested by Mervyn Busteed in his chapter on the Irish in
>Manchester. While recognising the importance of the census, his principal
>contribution is the imaginative and creative use he makes of ballad
>literature to reveal dimensions of Irish cultural life hitherto
>understudied. Using this data he argues that the residential clustering of
>Irish migrants was a defensive mechanism designed to cope with latent and
>overt hostility.
>
>John Belchem's chapter on the Irish in Liverpool, also sees ethnicity as
>defensive, emphasising that it was not a primordial attribute but a
>constructed identity, and that ethnic networks provided the benefits of
>security. This study is an explicit statement of the limitations of the
>census enumerators' books for understanding the social networks of the
>Irish. Belchem is careful to distinguish between social space (`the locus
>of ethnicity') and geographical space, which was often shared with members
>of other groups. He identifies successful migrants as `culture brokers', a
>group which tends to be obscured by aggregate census statistics.
>
>The theme of ethnic networks of mutuality is continued by Martha
>Kanya-Forstner in her fascinating study of notions of Irish Catholic
>womanhood as revealed through the activities of lay networks in Liverpool,
>especially the work of the St Vincent de Paul Society. Members of the
>Society (`brothers') were men, while two-thirds of the recipients of
>relief were women. The distinction between deserving and undeserving poor
>acquired new resonances, the former being the poor who performed their
>religious duties, with the priest as final arbiter of the issue, thereby
>extending his influence in the community. Poverty is revealed here as a
>gendered phenomenon. Given the paucity of studies of Irish women in
>nineteenth-century Britain, this essay stands out as a seminal
>contribution to the field.
>
>Recent writings on Irish settlement in nineteenth-century Britain have
>drawn attention to the small-town perspective, pointing out that
>significant numbers of the Irish settled in small numbers in towns like
>Chester and Stafford, where their experience was very different to the
>migrants who settled in the large cities. In the smaller towns, it has
>been suggested, the Irish failed to develop all-encompassing ethnic
>networks and gradually `faded' into the host society. By contrast, this
>volume redresses the balance in favour of the cities. There appears to be
>a growing consensus here that the larger cities of Irish migration in
>Britain would benefit from the kind of multi-author treatment accorded the
>Irish in New York (R. H. Bayor and T. J. Meagher (eds.) The New York Irish
>(1996)). Besides Liverpool, both London and Glasgow would surely be
>excellent candidates for this kind of study.
>
>Methodological questions of a different kind are raised by several
>contributors who make use of oral testimony and autobiography to shed
>light on the nature and persistence of ethnic identity. Colin G. Pooley's
>study of a Northern Irish Protestant woman who migrated to London in the
>1930s to take up a position in the civil service lifts the lid on an
>understudied aspect of Irish migration. Using a combination of diaries and
>interviews with his subject, he concludes that the woman in question
>assimilated easily into English society. Such a conclusion is hardly
>remarkable given the woman's Protestantism and Unionism, but it is all the
>more significant because of that. By contrast, Sean Campbell reassesses
>the uses to which Tom Barclay's much-quoted autobiography, Memoirs and
>Medleys: the Autobiography of a Bottle Washer (1934), has been put as a
>preamble to his study of the second-generation Irish in England. His
>reading of this text conflicts with the interpretations of other
>historians who have read Barclay's testimony as evidence of rapid `ethnic
>fade' in the second generation. This is an area which requires more
>systematic study, not just in terms of a few selected `classic' texts.
>This essay robustly questions essentialist definitions of Irishness and
>undermines claims that the second generation are invisible and easily
>assimilated. Campbell claims that at issue here is the definition of what
>it is to be Irish. He makes a case for assessing aspects of the cultural
>production of non- traditional musicians like John Lydon, the Gallaghers
>and others in terms of a distinctive Irish dimension. However, he finds
>that Irish migrants are often uncomfortable with the hybridity of
>second-generation Irishness and consequently actively seek to
>inauthenticate it. The message seems to be that what might be described as
>the institutionalisation of Irishness in the Republic can have its
>downside for members of a more loosely defined Irish `community' abroad.
>
>It is not only the parameters of Irishness which have changed since the
>creation of an Irish State. The political economy of Irish migration to
>Britain since 1921 has also changed dramatically for those hailing from
>the Free State (and, from 1949, the Republic); whereas from 1801 Irish
>migrants had been citizens of the United Kingdom, those who migrated after
>1921 belonged to a different legal jurisdiction. In an important essay,
>Enda Delaney assesses the nature of state intervention in the migration
>process from 1921 to 1945, during which time debates in Ireland about the
>constitutional position of the country led to discussion in Britain about
>restricting immigration. The IRA bombing campaign of 1939 and the onset of
>war meant that immigration was now regulated, especially as the Free State
>remained neutral. Delaney estimates that anything up to 150,000 Irish
>people migrated to Britain during the war years, some two-thirds of whom
>travelled under Ministry of Labour schemes. Free movement was reinstated
>in 1945. It struck this reviewer that the political economy of internal
>migration in Britain changed at roughly the same time, as the British
>State began to direct surplus labour from the depressed to the more
>buoyant regions. Although coincidental developments, a comparison of the
>two might provide instructive insights to changing attitudes to Irish
>migration.
>
>At one point in this fine collection of diverse and thought-provoking
>essays, Don MacRaild quotes a compelling metaphor by Donald Akenson to the
>effect that the international Irish Diaspora was like a Faberge egg, `a
>marvellously complex phenomenon' in which `details, though fascinating in
>themselves, are subordinated to the larger picture, since they all
>interrelate and are all subject to the whole.' While it would be
>misleading - and unfair - to say that the individual contributions to this
>book are incapable of standing alone (like the sections of a Faberge egg),
>it is also the case that taken as whole the volume amounts to much more
>than a miscellany. The guiding theme of the volume is the persistence of
>ethnicity and the failure of Irish migrants simply to disappear into
>British society in the second generation. The Irishness of both migrants
>and their descendants continued to be important, even for those distanced
>from the experience of migration itself by several generations. Something
>of a consensus emerges here that `ethnic fade' was deferred for far longer
>than some historians and sociologists have claimed in the past, with only
>one contributor arguing in favour of rapid integration. The unanswered
>question is whether Protestant Irish migrants retained a sense of ethnic
>attachment for as long as did Catholics. The one study dealing with this
>suggests that assimilation was, in fact, accomplished in the first
>generation. This is an area where further research is required before
>confident generalisations can be made. It is also necessary to take full
>account of the implications of the proliferating studies of Irish
>settlement in smaller towns, where Irish assimilation appears to have been
>rapid. Taking these factors into account points to the conclusion that
>migration is a singular noun but a plural experience. Each migration from
>Ireland to Britain from the mid-nineteenth century has been characterised
>by diversity of composition and plurality of experience.
>
>The Great Famine and Beyond is an extremely valuable addition to the
>historiography of the Irish in Britain and will be warmly welcomed by
>students of Irish migration more generally. It provides evidence of the
>continuing vitality of the field and addresses issues of concern to all
>historians of migration and ethnicity. It will be a key reference point
>for students and researchers for some time to come.
>
>
>June 2000.
>
>
>
>+--------------------------------------------------+
>|Anne Shepherd - Deputy Editor |
>| |
>|"Reviews in History" |
>|Institute of Historical Research |
>|School of Advanced Study |
>|Malet Street |
>|London WC1E 7HU |
>|020-7862-8787 |
>| |
>|email: ashepher[at]ihr.sas.ac.uk |
>| |
>| NEW SIMPLER URL ADDRESS !! |
>| |
>| SEE "Reviews in History" on: |
>| http://www.history.ac.uk |
>| |
>+--------------------------------------------------+
>
>
>
>
>
>
Dr. Paul O'Leary
Adran Hanes a Hanes Cymru / Dept. of History and Welsh History,
Prifysgol Cymru Aberystwyth / University of Wales Aberystwyth,
Aberystwyth,
Ceredigion, Wales, SY23 3DY

Tel: 01970 622842
Fax: 01970 622676

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan


Forwarded with permission...

>
>
>Reviews in History
>
>The Great Famine and Beyond:
>Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
>Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2000, pp. xii, 303.
>
>Donald M. MacRaild (ed.),
>
>
>Reviewed by: Paul O'Leary
>
>Lecturer, Dept. of History & Welsh History, University of Wales Aberystwyth.
>
>Author's Response: Donald MacRaild
>
>Paul O'Leary has written a very gracious review of my edited book and I am
>delighted to be able to respond to it. O'Leary's own work in the field is
>well-known and well-respected, not least the major monograph he has just
>published which fills what was an enormous gap in our appreciation of the
>complexities of Irish migration and community building in Wales.
>(Immigration and Integration: The Irish in Wales, 1798-1922, University of
>Wales Press, 2000). In taking up issues raised by O'Leary, I must state
>outright that what I offer here is a collection of my own opinion and
>thoughts. So, while I will pick up on issues he raises in discussing
>other contributors' essays, what I say is not necessarily what the
>individual authors would have said.
>
>O'Leary offers telling insights into all aspect of the Irish migrant
>experience. The volume was intended to have a distinct comparative strand
>and this is noted, and discussed, in the review. There is no question in
>my mind that comparative history is important; like O'Leary, I, too, am
>surprised that so little genuinely comparative research has been conducted
>in the field. Other migrant groups, such as Bailly's Italians, have been
>the subject of comparative analysis. When writing my chapter on the
>possibilities of studying Irish migrants as part of the wider Atlantic
>economy, I was echoing ideas put forward by Lyn Lees (albeit briefly) in
>the first chapter of her study of the Irish in London (Exiles of Erin: The
>Irish in Victorian London, Manchester University Press, 1979) and recent
>theoretical discussions by Nancy Green and Donald Akenson. But there was
>little else, relating to the Irish, which could be employed in my
>framework. I therefore must acknowledge that much more can, and should, be
>done. How different were the Irish in Britain? How quickly did they
>`assimilate'? Did they experience socio-economic improvement across
>generations? Did they come fully to participate in society? Questions
>such as these can only be answered following the sort of comparative
>reflection that also influenced the contributions to this volume of Alan
>O'Day and John Belchem. The answers to such questions, moreover, tell us
>as much about receiving communities as about the migrant group. With the
>current vogue for seeing migration as diasporic-as part of an
>international community-the need for a comparative method becomes even
>more salient.
>
>O'Leary spends considerable time discussing Sheridan Gilley's essay on
>Irish Catholicism in 19th century England. The problem of balancing
>religious and social interpretations of the migrants' church has vexed
>historians since E.P. Thompson wrote the Making of English Working Class
>(1963), a volume which has the priest more or less stereotypically cast as
>the dispensing chemist of Marx's opiate of the masses. Gilley has written
>numerous important articles that seek to underpin the fundamental
>religiosity of the Irish and of religious practice itself. He takes issue
>with studies that secularise explanations of religion. In so doing, he has
>a strong case. Both O'Leary and Gilley accept that a religious history
>also has a social dimension: the difficulty, however, lies in the
>explanation of intention, and in balancing that with the conflict of
>understanding which is implicit in studying behaviour that is
>simultaneously spiritual and social.
>
>O'Leary also makes vital points about the concepts of ethnicity and
>integration. His own book on the Welsh Irish illustrates how the Irish
>passed into Welsh society while demonstrating that the process was
>sometimes slow, often variable and rarely unproblematic. But the
>complexities of migration and community building are such that one fears a
>satisfactory might model might never be constructed. O'Leary hits on just
>this issue when, in reviewing the book, he poses a fascinating and, as
>yet, unanswerable question as to the pace of Protestant Irish integration
>into British society. In truth, we know little about Protestant Irish
>settlers in any part of the English- speaking world, save perhaps for
>Canada (where Akenson, Houston and Smyth, Darroch and Ornstein have
>conducted vital work). In Britain, it would appear to be necessary to ask
>different sorts of questions about the Irish Protestants than one would
>ask about their Catholic counterparts. Protestants held a diametrically
>different set of ethnic attachments which were shaped by cultural
>tradition as well as material existence. They had the Orange Order where
>Catholics had a variety of societies dedicated to a Catholic view of the
>world; they tended to be unionist rather than home rulers; they were more
>likely to be skilled than Catholics; and it is likely they voted
>Conservative rather than Liberal, although there was certainly a shift
>towards Labour after 1900.
>
>But how much any of this applies, and to what degree and at what point in
>time, remains a subject for serious study. I therefore agree
>wholeheartedly with O'Leary when he says that this, like other issues he
>raises, need to be put under the historical microscope. I am not sure if
>the volume will ultimately merit O'Leary's concluding remark-that it will
>be `a key reference for students and researchers for some time to
>come'-but the thought, like the sentiment behind it, is a nice one.
>
>June 2000
>
>
>
>
>
>+--------------------------------------------------+
>|Anne Shepherd - Deputy Editor |
>| |
>|"Reviews in History" |
>|Institute of Historical Research |
>|School of Advanced Study |
>|Malet Street |
>|London WC1E 7HU |
>|020-7862-8787 |
>| |
>|email: ashepher[at]ihr.sas.ac.uk |
>| |
>| NEW SIMPLER URL ADDRESS !! |
>| |
>| SEE "Reviews in History" on: |
>| http://www.history.ac.uk |
>| |
>+--------------------------------------------------+
>
>

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

I know that many members of the Irish-Diaspora list will welcome the publication of
J. Matthew Gallman
Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool and the Irish Famine Emigration,
1845-1855
University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill & London, 2000
ISBN 0 8078 2534 4

Especially those who have bemoaned the lack of comparative studies, and those who are
attempting similar tales of two cities.

Gallman's approach is a straighforwardly comparative approach to urban history. He takes
a crisis which affected cities in Britain and in the United States, he explores the
effects of that crisis on two cities, Liverpool, England, and Philadelphia, USA. And he
explores the, sometimes differing, sometimes similar, responses to the crisis in his
chosen two cities.

The crisis in question is, of course, the mass migration triggered by the Irish Famine -
so that this volume is an important contribution to Irish Diaspora Studies.

Full reviews of the volume will appear in due course. For the moment, we cannot but be
impressed by Gallman's courage, and the amount of hard work that has gone into the volume.
However, as far as I can see - since the volume has no separate bibliography and I have
not ploughed systematically through the notes - Gallman delivered his book for publication
before he had time to consult...
Frank Neal, Black 47: Britain and the Famine Irish (Basingstoke and New
York, Macmillan and St Martin's Press, 1998), ISBN 03333665953.
and
Peter Gray
Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society,
1843-50
Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1999
ISBN 0 7165 2564 X
(Both previously discussed on the Ir-D list)

Frank Neal and Peter Gray would have given support to Gallman's observations - about the
extent to which the Famine migrations were turned into LOCAL crises by government policies
and structures.

P.O'S.

- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 284 1580
Fax International +44 870 284 1580

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Re-Writing the Unwritten - it sounds like a beachcomb along the wilder shores of
post-modernism. But in fact it is what is happening, here in the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland, as the 'unwritten' British Constitution gets re-written.

1.
So, these thoughts are provoked by a recent thought-provoking essay by Mary Hickman...

'Binary Opposites' or 'Unique Neighbours'? The Irish in Multi-ethnic Britain
Hickman, Mary
Political Quarterly
2000 - volume 71 - issue 1 - page 50 - 58

One of Mary Hickman's starting points is the re-writing of the Constitution of the
Republic of Ireland, to accord with the detail of the Northern Ireland agreement. There
is little sign that the British Consitution is being so re-written - but how do you
re-write the unwritten?

[Political Quarterly is one of the journals with a Web presence. Some of you may be able
to access the full text of that article. But - I am afraid this is becoming a standard
paragraph - it is quite impossible to give individual advice about such access. Access to
these journals will vary from institution to institution, and sometimes from day to day -
as publishers allow 'guest' visitors.]

2.
There is a version of one of Mary Hickman's sources at...
The Irish diaspora and devolved democracy in the British-Irish islands
Simon Partridge
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~higher/diaspora.htm


3.
In fact the British Constiution is being re-written - bit by bit. For example, the bulk
of the hereditary peers have been ejected from the House of Lords. Whatever were the
historical origins of that particular approach to the creation of a second chamber, one of
its effects was to give a privileged constitutional position to certain extended families,
land-owning families, with lands in Britain, and in Ireland. It is easy to imagine an
alternative history of Ireland, and these islands, in which those families did not have
the power - and the incentive - to again and again impede peaceful progress. Yes, I have
been reading...
Edward Pearce, Lines of Most Resistance : The Lords, The Tories and Ireland, 1886-1914,
Little, Brown & Co., London, 1999.

4.
With the on/off Assembly in Northern Ireland, the Welsh Assembly, the Scottish Parliament,
the United Kingdom has (once again) become a Federal system - though there seems to be
extraordinarily little acknowledgement of that, and little appeal for guidance and
understanding to discussions elsewhere, or in the past. This is 'Home Rule all round'.

There is a helpful guide, Andrea Bosco ed., The Federal Idea, 2 volumes, Lothian
Foundation Press, London/New York, 1991. In which George Boyce has an essay, 'Federalism
and the Irish Question', which makes a very grand claim... 'British federalism is an
Irish invention...'

More soberly, see John Kendle, Federal Britain: A History, Routledge, London & New York,
1997.


5.
Another way that the British Consitution is being re-written is through international
agreements and conventions. We will, at last, here in the United Kingdom have something
approaching constutional rights, when, next October, the European Convention on Human
Rights is brought into law by the Human Rights Act. Scotland is ahread, of course, and
already the Scottish judges are looking to their colleagues abroad, for precedent and
guidance. Apparently there is a tendency to look to Canada, with its similar legal
traditions and judicial systems - but with a charter of rights and freedoms since 1982. I
note that Canadian Chief Justice, Beverly McLachlin, has - on the right to fair trial -
cited the case of the Birmingham Six. Irishmen in England - who, it will be recalled,
were Irish in the wrong place at the wrong time...

P.O'S.


- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 284 1580
Fax International +44 870 284 1580

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From: "Brian McGinn"
Subject: Frederic G. Cassidy, Lexicographer
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 19:09:24 -0400


The following comment and obituary are forwarded courtesy of the Montserrat
list, The Electronic Evergreen. Some Ir-Ders may recognize John Wells of
University College, London as the author of "The brogue that isn't", a
controversial article debunking the idea that the local speech of
Montserrat retains any Irish characteristics. Journal of the International
Phonetic Association , Vol. 10, Nos. 1-2 (June/December 1980), 74-79.
Although Cassidy's _Dictionary of Jamaican English_ (CUP, 1967) has
bani/banikleva (sour, curdled milk, from bainne clabair), one of the two
clearly Irish words that Wells found still in use in Montserratian Creole,
the best place to look for evidence of Irishisms in Jamaica is Cassidy's
_Jamaica Talk_ (London: Macmillan, 1961). Here Cassidy concluded that
ninety percent of the more than four thousand Jamaicanisms in his volume
were of English origin, by which he meant words which came to Jamaica,
often altered in form, from the British Isles. Of these, Cassidy believed
"the greatest number may be Scots or Irish." Among his Irish examples was
streela, in Jamaican English a sash worn around (and sometimes hanging
untidily from) a woman's waist. One of the non-Irish terms in Cassidy's DJE
that caught my eye was Hitler Boot, footwear improvised from discarded auto
tires during the leather shortages of WWII. By the 1960s, the same concept
had entered American English, via Vietnam, as a Ho Chi Minh sandal.

Brian McGinn
Alexandria, Virginia

___________
Via MNI-INFO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I was saddened to see in today's Guardian newspaper, London, that Fred
Cassidy has died. He was best-known as the author of the Dictionary of
American Regional English, but for us is particularly important as the
co-author (with Bob LePage) of the Dictionary of Jamaican English (CUP
1970, second edition 1980). Before that, he had written the pioneering book
"Jamaica Talk", one of the first serious attempts to describe a creole
variety of English.

Below is the text of the Guardian's obituary.

I knew Cassidy personally, and was fortunate enough to have him act as
referee when I was up for promotion in the university.

John Wells

=====

Frederic Cassidy
A life spent exploring the folk idioms of America and Jamaica

Christopher Reed

Saturday July 1, 2000


The lexicographer Frederic Cassidy, who has died aged 92, described himself
as a lexicolator or "word worshipper". He adored words and phrases - or
folk idioms - made up by ordinary people to describe events around them. He
specialised in finding the most exotic, and delighted in the strange sounds
and often onomatopoeic quality of expressions rarely found in orthodox
dictionaries. Two favourites were "honeyfuggle", a Kentucky word for
flattering sweet talk, and a "flang dang", a Texan description of a loud
party with music.

A white Jamaican, who moved to the United States as a child, Cassidy was as
highly regarded as James Murray, the Scottish philologist who edited what
became the Oxford English Dictionary. He spent decades collecting and
investigating words and phrases in regional America for what was to become
a five-volume work, the Dictionary of American Regional English, of which
he became editor in the 1960s.

He expected to complete it by the end of the century, but, by last year,
had only produced three volumes. Lexicography, he noted, "is not a rapid
science". Volume IV is now expected in 2002 under the editorship of his
successor, Joan Houston Hall, and Volume V in 2007. It will have covered
70,000 words and meanings with annotations on their origins and history.

Cassidy began with a list of 40,000 words, amassed over the decades by
members of the American Dialect Society. He then spread the search to all
50 states, with researchers interviewing 2,752 people in 1,002 communities
over five years, asking each one a list of 1,874 questions. These were
required because the team found that people were not always aware that
words or phrases they used were local and specialised.

A typical question would be: "What is a term used around here for a very
slow person?" That brought 302 ways to described a "slow coach", or to use
the more general Americanism, a "slowpoke". Similes were encouraged and
these included "like coal tar running uphill", or "slow as fleas falling
off a dead dog", and "slow as cream a-rising".

For something as ordinary as a household dust ball, Cassidy's researchers
found "dust bunnies", "dust puppies", "dust tigers" and "collywobbles". In
Knoxville, Tennessee, they discovered speakers referring to the jitters as
the "fum-fidgets" and "hoo-daddles".

A personal favourite of Cassidy's appeared in a suburban Philadelphia
newspaper, in an article about police troubles with "hoofties". The
lexicolator traced its origins to the area's German community, and the word
in German, hufte, which means hip. He concluded that "hoofties" were
"hippies".

Cassidy rejected arguments that his folk idioms were not real words -
because they were not standard - as little more than snobbery. "If a
meaning is communicated," he wrote, "the word is real." And if he ever
encountered a word with curious origins, he would say with relish: "Let's
look it up."

The son of an accountant father and university professor mother, Cassidy
grew up in Kingston, speaking two languages, standard English at home and
Jamaican Creole in the community. When he was 11, the family moved to
Akron, Ohio, and he gained a bachelor's degree in 1930, and a master's in
1932, from Oberlin College. In 1938, he received a PhD from the University
of Michigan.

He began teaching English literature in 1939 at the Unniversity of
Wisconsin and, although he retired a decade ago, he retained an office and
directed work on the dictionary with 13 staffers. He returned frequently to
Jamaica, and, in 1967, completed his first work, the Dictionary of Jamaican
English. It had taken 16 years to finish.

His wife, Helene Lucile Monod, whom he met as a fellow student in Michigan,
died in 1980. The couple had four children.

Frederic George Cassidy, lexicographer, born October 10 1907; died June 14
2000



. . . The Electronic Evergreen, courtesy of GEM Radio Network