From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Yet another Palgrave Macmillan book of interest...

This one includes chapters by Willy Maley, Harte & Pettit, Gerry Smyth,
and Aidan Arrowsmith.

P.O'S.

http://www.palgrave.com/catalogue/catalogue.asp?Title_Id=0333723392

Comparing Postcolonial Literatures
Dislocations
Ashok Bery, Patricia Murray

Hardback
March 2000
296 pages

216mm x 138mm
ISBN:0333723392
£50.00.


Reviews:

'...a timely and important collection of essays which challenges the
intellectual and disciplinary borders of postcolonialism while attending
to a variety of literatures often neglected in studies of postcolonial
culture...As well as constituting a busy and intelligent contribution to
the field, Comparing Postcolonial Literatures shows the way forward for
postcolonial studies by pushing against its disciplinary borders in a
healthy spirit of self-critique and innovation.' - John McLeod,
University of Leeds

Description:
Bringing together a range of critics working on the hispanic and
francophone as well as anglophone post-colonial regions, this book aims
to dislocate some of the commonly accepted cultural, linguistic and
geographical boundaries that have previously informed post-colonial
studies. Collected essays include: cross-cultural comparisons from areas
as diverse as Africa, Ireland and Latin America; analysis of specific
texts as sites of border conflict; and revisions of post-colonial
theoretical frameworks.


A timely questioning of the categories of a critical field at the point
when it is becoming increasingly comparative, this volume seeks to
suggest more dynamic ways of working in post-colonial cultural studies.

Contents:
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction; A.Bery & P.Murray
PART I: ON THE BORDER
Postcolonial Studies in Ireland; C.L.Innes
Crossing the Hyphen of History: The Scottish Borders of Anglo-Irishness;
W.Maley The Politics of Hybridity: Some Problems with Crossing the
Border; G.Smyth PART II: DIASPORAS Inside Out: Literature, Cultural
Identity and Irish Migration to England; A.Arrowsmith States of
Dislocation: William Trevor's Felicia's Journey and Maurice Leitch's
Gilchrist; L.Harte & L.Pettitt It's a Free Country: Visions of Hybridity
in the Metropolis; G.Stoneham I Came All the Way from Cuba So I Could
Speak Like This? Cuban and Cubanamerican Literatures in the US; N.Araújo
PART III: INTERNALIZED EXILES Border Anxieties: Race and Psychoanalysis;
D.Marriott Nationalism's Brandings: Women's Bodies and Narratives of the
Partition; S.Singh Internalized Exiles: Three Bolivian Writers;
K.Richards Writing Other Lives: Native American (Post) Coloniality and
Collaborative (Auto) Biography; S.Forsyth 'The Limits of Goodwill': The
Value and Dangers of Revisionism in Keneally's 'Aboriginal' Novels;
D.Vernon PART IV: VERSIONS OF HYBRIDITY The Trickster at the Border:
Cross-cultural Dialogues in the Caribbean; P.Murray Between Speech and
Writing: 'La Nouvelle Littérature Antillaise'?; S.Haigh Hybrid Texts:
Family, State and Empire in a Poem by Black Cuban Poet Excilia Saldana;
C.Davies Beyond Manicheism: Derek Walcott's Henri Christophe and Dream
on Monkey Mountain; J.Thieme 'Canvas of Blood': Okigbo's African
Modernism; D.Richards Closing Statement: Apprenticeship to the Furies;
W.Harris

Author Biographies:
ASHOK BERYis Senior Lecturer in English at the University of North
London. His research interests include modern poetry and postcolonial
literature and theory. He has published on the novels of R. K. Narayan
and is currently working on a comparative study of modern poetry.


PATRICIA MURRAY is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of North
London. She has published articles on Latin American, Caribbean and
contemporary British writing. She has a book forthcoming entitled Shared
Solitude: the Fiction of Wilson Harris and Gabriel García Márquez.



Copyright © 2002 Palgrave Macmillan Publishers Ltd
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS, England
Legal Notice | Privacy Policy | North American site | Contact us

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Another Palgrave Macmillan book of interest...

P.O'S.

http://www.palgrave.com/catalogue/catalogue.asp?Title_Id=0333997417

Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650
Clodagh Tait

Hardback
November 2002
240 pages

216mm x 138mm
ISBN:0333997417
£45.00.

Description:
This book is the first detailed examination of death in early modern
Ireland. It deals with the process of dying, the conduct of funerals,
the arrangement of burials, the private and public commemoration of the
dead, and ideas about the afterlife. It further considers ways in which
the living fashioned ceremonies of death and the reputations of the dead
to support their own ends. It will be of interest to those concerned
with Irish history and death studies generally.

Contents:
List of Figures and Maps
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Dying Well
From Death to Burial
Burial Location and Society
The Politics of Disinterment
The Nature and Uses of Funerary Monuments
Funerary Monuments and Society: Family, Honour and Death Afterlives
Conclusion Select Bibliography Index

Author Biographies:
CLODAGH TAIT is a Lecturer in History at the University College Dublin,
Ireland. Her published articles deal with aspects of death,
commemoration and Catholic martyrdom in early modern Ireland.



Copyright © 2002 Palgrave Macmillan Publishers Ltd
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS, England
Legal Notice | Privacy Policy | North American site | Contact us

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

The latest Palgrave MacMillan list includes a number of items of
interest, including these 2 volumes edited by Camille O'Reilly.

Camille is the author of The Irish Language in Northern Ireland, The
Politics of Culture and Identity, also published by Palgrave.

You often find sample chapters on the Palgrave Macmillan web site
www.palgrave.com

For Information...

P.O'S.

Language, Ethnicity and the State
Volume 1: Minority Languages In The European Union
Camille C. O'Reilly

Hardback
September 2001
200 pages
216mm x 138mm
ISBN:033392925X
£45.00.

Description:
Developments in the European Union over the last decade have been
largely positive from the perspective of stateless and minority ethnic
groups and the survival and prosperity of minority languages. This
selection of sociologically and ethnographically oriented work enables
the reader to compare developments in different ethno-linguistic revival
movements within the European Union. The contributions also explore the
impact of EU policy and discourse on the individual movements and the
orientation of Western Europe as a whole towards linguistic
heterogeneity and cultural diversity.

A companion volume (0-333-92924-1) examines the status of minority
languages in post-1989 Eastern Europe.

Contents:
Introduction: Minority Languages, Ethnicity and the State in the
European Union; C.O'Reilly Many Tongues But One Voice: A Personal
Overview of the Role of the European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages in
Promoting Europe's Regional and Minority Languages; D.Ó.Riagáin State
Language Ideology and the Shifting Nature of Minority Language Planning
on Corsica; A.Jaffe Catalan is Everyone's Thing: Normalizing a Nation;
S.DiGiacomo Irish Language, Irish Identity: Northern Ireland and the
Republic of Ireland in the European Union; C.O'Reilly Ethnic Identity
and Minority Language Survival in Brittany; L.Timm When Language Does
Not Matter: Regional Identity Formation in Northern Italy; J.Stacul
'Old' and 'New' Lesser Used Languages of Europe: Common Cause?;
T.Cheesman Bibliography Index


Language, Ethnicity and the State
Volume 2: Minority Languages in Eastern Europe Post-1989
Camille C. O'Reilly

Hardback
September 2001
240 pages

216mm x 138mm
ISBN:0333929241
£47.50.


Description:
The political and social upheavals following 1989 have had a significant
impact on the minority languages of Eastern Europe. There have been
attempts at enlightened treatment of minority linguistic groups in some
of the new states but in others such groups have been openly oppressed.
This volume draws on sociologically and ethnographically oriented work
from a number of disciplines to allow the reader to compare developments
in the different states, and to examine the interplay of language
issues, ethnic nationalism, and processes of state formation and
restructuring in the various political and historical contexts of
Central and Eastern Europe.

A companion volume (0-333-92925-X) examines the status of minority
languages in the European Union.

Contents:
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction; Minority, Languages, Ethnicity and the State in Post-1989
Eastern Europe; C. O'Reilly Language, Nationalism and the Yugoslav
Successor States; R.Greenberg Debating Language: The Bulgarian
Communities in Romania after 1989; R. Guentcheva From Irredentism to
Constructive Reconciliation? Germany and its Minorities in Poland and
the Czech Republic; S.Wolff Language Ideology and Language Conflict in
Post-Soviet Belarus; C.Woolhiser The Politics of Language in Moldova;
T.Hegarty Ethnic Discrimination in Latvia; J.Dobson Language, Nation and
State-building in Ukraine: The Jewish Response; R.Golbert Bibliography
Index

Author Biographies:
CAMILLE O. REILLY is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Richmond, the
American International University in London. She is the author of The
Irish Language in Northern Ireland: The Politics and Culture of Identity
and of many articles on nationalism, the Irish language and Northern
Ireland.

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows, ed. _Press, Politics and the Public
Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760-1820_ includes a chapter on
Ireland by Douglas Simes.

The following book review seems worth distributing.

P.O'S.


- -----Original Message-----
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion[at]h-net.msu.edu (December, 2002)

Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows, ed. _Press, Politics and the Public
Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760-1820_. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002. ix + 263 pp. Tables, notes, and index. $60.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-521-66207-9.

Reviewed for H-Albion, by Jeremy Black, Department of History,
University of Exeter

This book is welcome for three reasons, but has two limitations for
readers of this network. It is welcome, first, because it ignores the
customary divide at the French Revolution and bridges the
late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This is fruitful,
specifically for those interested in newspaper history, although it is
important not to overlook the discontinuities arising from the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and, more generally, for work on
political culture and structure. Indeed the scope of this book, which
follows that of a number of scholars including Jonathan Clark and Jim
Sack, invites reconsideration of established chronological divisions.

Secondly, the collection offers readers on British history up-to-date
treatments of the subject in a number of other countries with which they
are not generally familiar. France and Britain have already been
fruitfully compared by Bob Harris, but this collection adds the
Netherlands, Germany, America, Italy, and Russia, as well as a
thoughtful and well-researched piece by Simon Burrows on the
"cosmopolitan press" which is based on his valuable work on
French-language newspapers published outside France. Thirdly, these
essays offer a comparative context within which British developments can
be considered, and this context is helpfully advanced by the wideranging
and interesting introduction by the two editors.

The two major limitations are a failure to include Scotland, on which
Bob Harris is currently working, and Hannah Barker's decision in her
chapter on England essentially to summarize the literature rather than
to engage in new research. This is a major disappointment, not least
because it follows the pattern of her _Newspapers, Politics and English
Society, 1695-1855_ (Harlow, 2000). There is indeed need for a thorough
analysis of the English press, especially in the 1800s, a decade in
which they have not been recently considered. Furthermore, Barker
repeats the teleological progressivism so often seen in newspaper
history, the limitations of which I tried to indicate in my _English
Press 1621-1861_ (Stroud, 2001), a work that presumably appeared too
late for discussion in this book.

Barker argues that public opinion, rather than political manipulation,
was the driving force behind newspaper politics, that "by and large" (p.
100) subsidy was not the controlling force in newspaper partisanship,
that politicians were constrained by the impact of a widespread belief
in the sanctity of the liberty of the press, and that high prices did
not necessarily mean low or socially restricted readerships. Instead,
an extensive broadening of the newspaper-reading public is discerned and
the press is presented as "certainly populist" (p. 108).

This account downplays the extent to which newspapers favored a program
of social improvement and propounded a social politics based on moral
politeness. This morality drew on the major cultural themes of the
middling orders in this period, especially Christian conduct, polite
behavior, and moral improvement. Moreover, it was important to the
shaping of that body of society and, by admonition or exclusion, to the
positioning of the rest. A sense of what was appropriate, and thus
respectable, was inculcated through print.

In part, this reflected the success of creating a common code of
behavior for what was termed "polite" society, one that spanned town and
countryside. The frequent attacks on popular superstitions, drunkenness,
and a range of activities that were held to characterize a distressingly
wide section of the population, such as profanity and cruelty to
animals, do not suggest that the press was asserting values shared by
all.

Instead, this was a socially specific moral resonance, appropriate for a
medium with restricted circulation. This would not have disturbed
writers calling for the moralizing of a supposedly dissolute population,
subscribers to good causes wishing to see their names, causes and
prejudices recorded for posterity, or advertisers offering high-value
goods and services that required advertising in a world where most were
not advertised other than orally.

The press reflected the interests and views of the middling orders.
Thus, Jackson's Oxford Journal of 3 July 1790 reported:

"The riots so usual at contested elections have been uncommonly violent
in many of the county boroughs, but none perhaps have been so dangerous
as those at Leicester and Nottingham.

"The four candidates at the former town, imitating the example of
greater men, on Wednesday last entered into a coalition to return one
Member for each party. This junction was no sooner made public, than it
became the signal for one of the most mischievous riots we ever heard
of. The mob were so exasperated at being bilked of further extortion on
the several candidates, that they broke open the town-hall, and
completely gutted it. They made a bonfire of the Quarter Sessions Books,
and the records of the town, burnt the public library, and would have
murdered the Coalitionists, could they have got at them. Several persons
have been most severely wounded, and one man is killed. It was not till
after the military were called in, and the Riot Act read, that the mob
was dispersed."

Criticism in this case, therefore, was directed not at the agreement
among the elite to prevent a contest, but rather at the popular
response. This was an aspect of a political, social, economic and moral
paternalism that was, for example, opposed to worker activism. The
frequent stress in the press on charitable acts by the fortunate was
symptomatic of this "top-down" approach. Paternalism grounded in moral
behavior and religious attitudes, rather than economic dominance, was
the justification of the social policy required for the well-ordered
society that was presented by the press as a necessary moral goal.
Public opinion was not treated as an essentially democratic political
phenomenon. The contents of newspapers was part of a polite sociable
sphere that was not totally separate from its popular counterpart, but
that was recognizably different in tone. This helps explain the contrast
that can be readily noted with late nineteenth-century popular
newspapers.

In a useful chapter on the situation in Ireland, Douglas Simes argues
that "the Irish public political sphere was apparently polarized by
religion rather than fragmented by class, and the press both reflected
and facilitated this process" (p. 134). Simes considers a range of
subjects including sales and subsidies, and indicates that commercial
viability was a real problem in the 1820s, not least because the end of
the Napoleonic Wars lessened the need for government support. He also
valuably points out lacunae in the scholarship. Overall, there is still
room for much work in the field. I have highlighted some of the issues
in "The Press and Politics in the Eighteenth Century," _Media History_ 8
(2002).

Copyright 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks[at]mail.h-net.msu.edu.

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

And why - you ask - am I spending so much time looking through the
Palgrave Macmillan web site...

Well, we have discussed the work of essayist Chris Arthur on Ir-D
before. There are now 2 collections, Irish Nocturnes and Irish
Willow... Many reviews on the web, and some samples... Examples...

http://www.emigrant.ie/article.asp?iCategoryID=49&iArticleID=3243

http://www.local.ie/content/10358.shtml

http://omega.cc.umb.edu/~irish/nocturnes.htm

http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/library/arthur01.html

http://collection.nlc-bnc.ca/100/202/300/charlotte/2000/12-17/pages/inte
rviews/authors/chrisarthur.htm

I coaxed Chris into entering the Palgrave Macmillan Humanities and
Social Sciences Writing Prize 2002...

Chris has just contacted me to tell me that he has won Second Prize -
which is a considerable amount of Palgrave Macmillan books. So - we
have been browsing...

Our only complaint is that Chris did not win First Prize - which
actually involved money...

Paddy


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

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Personal Fax 0044 (0) 709 236 9050

Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/
Irish Diaspora Net Archive http://www.irishdiaspora.net

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Social Sciences and Humanities
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

Subject: Re: Ir-D Tempo Exterior
From: "michael j. curran"

Pat
would like to hear more about Galicia group. I also have contacts in
Santiago de Compostella. Particularly interested in psychosocial aspects
of their recent migration, and maybe funding for a comparative (with
Ireland) quantitative study on acculturation and health might come on
tap. Best wishes for Xmas and 2003.

Keep me posted

Michael J. Curran (curranmj[at]tcd.ie)
Irish Diaspora Project
Dept. of Psychology
Aras an Phiarsaigh,
Trinity College
Dublin 2, Ireland

From: "Richard Jensen"
Subject: Fw: Greenberg on Gleeson, _The Irish in the South_

David T. Gleeson. _The Irish in the South, 1815-1877_. Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xii + 278 pp.
Acknowledgements, appendix, notes, selected bibliography, index. $45.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2639-1; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-4968-5.

Reviewed for H-South by Mark I. Greenberg ,
University of South Florida, Tampa

Scarlett O'Hara and the Blarney Stone

For author David Gleeson, _Gone with the Wind_ offers insight into Irish
immigration to the nineteenth-century South. "The ease with which the
public accepted the Irish immigrant and [Gerald O'Hara's] fictional
family as 'true' southerners emphasizes just how well the Irish had
blended into the native population," he notes in the book's final
paragraph (p. 194). By the 1930s, the Irish had become the region's
"forgotten" people.

How Irish immigrants to the South went from outsiders to "forgotten" in
a century forms a central theme in Gleeson's thought-provoking study,
and it raises important issues in southern and immigrant/ethnic history.
The white South's ethnic composition has received limited study, and
immigrant/ethnic scholars have missed opportunities to address regional
distinctiveness, he asserts. _The Irish in the South_ seeks to bridge
these two literatures by adding an ethnic dimension to southern history
and a southern dimension to American ethnic history.

Contrasting the "forgotten" theme, Gleeson devotes considerable
attention to Irish ethnic institutions and awareness. "It would not have
been surprising if the Irish in the South, under pressure from a
dominant Protestant majority, had jettisoned their diasporic baggage and
sacrificed their Irishness for native acceptance. They did not, however,
commit cultural suicide," he writes (p. 22). Instead, he notes countless
examples of how the Irish exhibited a cultural heritage, used it to
their advantage, diverged from contemporary ethnic stereotypes, and
integrated into the non-Irish community.

Like many ethnic studies, the book begins with a familiar discussion of
"push/pull" factors and migration patterns. Many Irish immigrants that
came south landed first in a northern port, read of economic
opportunities in the press, and moved southward in search of work.
Overwhelmingly an agrarian population in Ireland, the Irish in America
eschewed rural life. Unfamiliar with a cash crop economy, lacking
capital, and fearing physical isolation and continued destitution, they
settled overwhelmingly in towns and cities. At most 2 percent of the
Confederate states' white population, the Irish urban presence exceeded
20 percent in 1860 Savannah and over 14 percent in Charleston, Mobile,
and New Orleans.

Seeking to give Irish workers agency in their economic lives and prove
that they were "not victims of urbanization" (p. 37), Gleeson argues
that Irish occupational status varied more widely than
nineteenth-century observers revealed. "Despite an Irish presence in
every sector of the urban workforce," he concedes "monotonous physical
labor was the norm for the largest group of Irish workers" (p. 46).
Premature mortality, yellow fever, and cholera placed great stress on
almshouses. Crime, alcoholism, and violence further disrupted earning
power and stable family life. Short discussions of an 1844 Memphis
strike for a ten-hour day and unionism in New Orleans offer only slim
support for the author's argument that the Irish were not "pliable
victims of the southern economy" (p. 51). Largely missing from his
discussions is slavery's impact on Irish economic life, patterns and
methods of upward mobility over time or between generations, Irish labor
networks, loan organizations, and other collaborative efforts.

Residential clustering, marriage, social and benevolent organizations,
militia companies, and political activism for Irish home rule support
Gleeson's assertion that the Irish exhibited an ethnic identity in the
South. Faith in God offered cultural stability as well. Ulster
immigrants established Presbyterian churches and Catholics gave Roman
Catholicism a distinctly Irish tinge. After slow institutional
development in the early 1800s and opposition to the predominantly
French clerical leadership of the Early National Period, Irish Catholics
successfully appealed to Rome for new sees in Virginia and South
Carolina. Charleston's Irish bishops, John England and his successor
Patrick N. Lynch, argued for the compatibility of Catholicism and
republicanism, supported slavery, and worked to limit anti-Catholic
sentiment among the overwhelmingly Protestant population. Lay
leadership, changes in religious belief and practices over time, what
role the Church played in the secession crisis of the 1850s, relations
between northern and southern dioceses over slavery and secession, and
interaction between Irish Presbyterians and Catholics receive little
attention in these pages.

The Democratic Party actively courted Irish voters and played up Whigs'
nativism, according to the author. The Irish responded by serving as the
backbone of Democratic support in several southern towns. Though Irish
immigrant politicians were relatively few in number, many more emigrants
from the Emerald Isle organized on behalf of candidates and party
policies. Returning to his theme of assimilation and acceptance, Gleeson
contends that Irish immigrants' ability to sway close elections was "a
major symbol of their integration into southern society" (p. 94).

Though Irish immigrants took the Know Nothing threat quite seriously,
their acceptance into southern society faced little real challenge from
the party, Gleeson asserts. Checking slavery's expansion and preserving
the Union, more than nativism, drew southern supporters to the
Democrats' chief political rival in the mid 1850s. Strongest in the
cities where immigrants concentrated, the Know Nothings inflamed the
population with their anti-Irish sentiment and elected mayors and
council members in several cities. Tarred with an abolitionist label,
the American Party's successes were short-lived, and by 1856 Irish
voters had helped to oust its politicians everywhere except in New
Orleans.

Irish interactions with slaves and free blacks and reactions to the
secession crisis--covered in just twenty pages--form some of the most
interesting but least developed material in the book. Irish immigrants'
"white skin and their acceptance of slavery automatically elevated them
from the bottom of southern society," Gleeson argues, and thus "they did
not have to 'become white' but immediately exploited the advantages
their race accorded them" (p. 121). Explicitly rejecting all "whiteness
studies" for perceived weaknesses in the work of Noel Ignatiev and David
Roediger, the author misses opportunities to address the complex
relationship between race, class, and social status in the
nineteenth-century South. He argues unpersuasively that acceptance came
in part because native southerners "appreciated the economic value of
Irish laborers" because "the Irish were willing to take on potentially
high-mortality occupations, thereby sparing valuable slave property" (p.
193).

In addressing how an overwhelmingly non-slaveholding Irish population
went from solid Unionists in 1850 to secessionists by 1860, Gleeson
offers several suggestions but limited depth. Seeking to show that Irish
immigrants' integration into southern white society guided their
political views on the crisis, he briefly mentions allegiance to the
Democrats, proslavery sentiment, support for the "southern way of life,"
Church-demanded loyalty to existing institutions, and perceived
similarities between Ireland's and the South's political positions. This
last idea he explores in just one paragraph and references a single 1858
newspaper article.

Factors propelling the Irish to support secession moved them to
"volunteer in droves" for Confederate military service, because they
"believed in the southern cause" (p. 155). Forming ethnic companies,
carousing in camp, and usually fighting with ferocity in battle, Irish
soldiers also deserted in relatively larger numbers than native-born
whites. On the home front, some Irish immigrants likened Union
occupation of the South to British occupation of their native lands and
sacrificed for the war effort. Others complained bitterly about new
hardships and rioted for bread. When Union soldiers entered New Orleans
in April 1862--just a year into the war--"many Irish New Orleanians were
not too distressed" (p. 168). Slaves' emancipation and long-held fears
of job competition drove angry Irish immigrants to violent repression of
freedmen's newfound economic and political rights. With the key to their
status abolished at war's end, thousands of Irish workers gave up on
southern cities and left the region.

Just how "southern" Irish immigrants became remains unproven by book's
end. Though Gleeson argues that the Irish "completed their integration
into southern society" by 1877 (p. 173), he never defines the term and
often uses "southern" interchangeably with "American" to describe the
same actions and attitudes. What does it mean to be a southerner in
1815, 1850, the 1860s, or 1877? Is it more than support for slavery,
states' rights, the Confederacy, and black codes? The author offers few
if any regional comparisons of occupational structure, ethnic
institutions, family life, residential patterns, and other topics
regularly addressed by ethnic historians and found in the rich "southern
distinctiveness" literature. These omissions prevent him from assessing
whether "southerness" extended beyond conformity to pressing political
issues.

Moreover, Gleeson provides weak analysis of the processes guiding
immigrant acculturation and ethnic identity formation. Scholars such as
Kathleen Conzen, Ewa Morawska, George Pozzetta, Rudolph Vecoli, and
others have advanced sophisticated models that account for an uneven
course influenced by stimuli internal and external to the immigrant
community. To argue that Irish immigrants were "more southern and less
Irish" (p. 186) in 1877 than 1815 overlooks a generation of scholarship
and misses opportunities to explore how specific moments in time, such
as a war, can affect identity and how a cessation of hostilities often
relieves pressures on conformity. Rather than explaining how Irish
immigrants had become "less Irish" in 1877, Gleeson could have offered
insight into the shifting and multiple meanings of Irishness over time.

For Scarlett O'Hara and other southerners of Irish heritage, Old World
and New World identities were not incompatible. In every generation,
Americans of all backgrounds have held multiple, shifting identities. If
by the 1930s the Irish became a forgotten people in the South,
historians lost them. David Gleeson is to be commended for recognizing
the important history and roles Irish immigrants played.

Copyright (c) 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks[at]mail.h-net.msu.edu.

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

For Information...

P.O'S.

{http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/ireland_conference.html}

PRESS RELEASE FROM University of Virginia...

Dec. 6, 2002 ? President Mary McAleese of Ireland will keynote
"Re-Imagining Ireland: Transformations of Identity in a Global Context",
the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities? groundbreaking international
conference and festival, to be held May 7-10, 2003 in Charlottesville.
With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and
Ireland?s Cultural Relations Committee, this unique gathering will
feature more than 100 journalists, writers, politicians, artists,
scholars, musicians, and citizen activists from Ireland and around the
U.S.

A town meeting of Ireland, out of Ireland, "Re-Imagining Ireland" will
explore the relation between global economics and traditional culture,
the challenges and opportunities posed by the worldwide migration of
national populations, and connections between religious and political
identity and issues of war and peace. Focusing attention on Ireland?s
and Northern Ireland?s changing profile in a global context, the program
will have particular relevance for an American audience, speaking to
their country?s role in the world of the future.

?'Re-Imagining Ireland' has been planned as a kind of ?time-out? on
neutral ground,? says project director Andrew Higgins Wyndham. ?We want
to take people out of place, routine, and mind-set, to a new environment
in America, where for four days they will exclusively focus on, analyze,
and appreciate Irish culture, both in itself and in relation to America
and other parts of the world.?

The conference and festival schedule includes 31 thematically organized
panel sessions and special activities. On the roster are two major
concerts, a series of musical narratives, an award-winning play, a new
Irish feature film and series of short films, readings by major Irish
poets, and an exhibition of contemporary Irish art. The program will
accommodate 450 participants and featured guests from Ireland and
throughout the United States, with larger audiences, ranging up to 900,
at special events. A broadcast documentary film and published book will
extend the life and reach of the program.

Mary McAleese, the opening speaker, is the eighth President of the
Republic of Ireland and the first to come from Northern Ireland. A
barrister and former professor of law, she was graduated in law from the
Queen's University, Belfast, in 1973 and was called to the Northern
Ireland Bar in 1974. In 1975, she was appointed Reid Professor of
Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin. In
1987, she returned to her alma mater, to become Director of the
Institute of Professional Legal Studies. In 1994, she became the first
female Pro-Vice Chancellor of Queen's University. President McAleese is
also an experienced broadcaster, having worked as a current affairs
journalist and presenter in radio and television with Radio Telefís
Éireann, Ireland?s national broadcaster.

Among the 102 other participants slated to appear at the conference are
such award-winning writers and poets as Frank McCourt, Roddy Doyle,
Nuala O?Faolain, Colm Toibin, Ciaran Carson, Paula Meehan, and Cathal O
Searcaigh; renowned musicians, including Frankie Gavin, Seamus Egan,
Mick Moloney, Andy Irvine, Joannie Madden, Martin Hayes, Tommy Sands,
Bruce Molsky, and Len Graham and Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin; celebrated
historians, including Declan Kiberd, Joe Lee, Kerby Miller, Donald
Akenson, Tim Pat Coogan, Marianne Elliott, Roy Foster, and Noel
Ignatiev; respected journalists and authors Susan McKay, Jacki Lyden,
Eamonn McCann, David McKittrick, and Fintan O?Toole; and such well-known
activists and politicians as Margaret Mac Curtain, Michael D. Higgins
and David Ervine. Participants will also include economists, prominent
business and cultural leaders, clergy, Irish Travelers (sometimes
referred to as ?tinkers? or gypsies), and representatives of the news
media.

Major arts events will include concerts by ?De Dannan? and ?The Green
Fields of America? and by ?Solas? and ?Cherish the Ladies;? an
exhibition of contemporary sculpture and painting from the Irish Museum
of Modern Art, to be presented from April 12 - June 8 at the University
of Virginia Art Museum; performances of Michael West?s ?Foley,? an
award-winning play starring Abbey actor Andrew Bennett, from Dublin?s
Corn Exchange and Richard Wakely Productions; a series of short films
from the Cork International Film Festival; and a new dramatic feature
film from the Irish Film Board.

"Re-Imagining Ireland" is funded by a $200,000 award from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and a grant of 50,000 Euros from the
Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland. Additional major support has
been provided by the Anne Lee Ueltschi Foundation, the Office of the
President at the University of Virginia, Foras na Gaeilge in Dublin,
Caterpillar, RBC Dain Rauscher, the U.Va. Forum for Contemporary
Thought, the Milwaukee Irish Fest Foundation, Peter Sutherland, and
other individual donors. Dominion Digital of Charlottesville and
Richmond is contributing the design of the "Re-Imagining Ireland" Web
site; ServerVault is the pro bono host of the site. Institutional
co-sponsors include Poetry Ireland, the Film Board of Ireland, the Cork
International Film Festival, the Irish Centre for Migration Studies, the
Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Glucksman Ireland House at New York
University.

Beyond the conference and festival, the "Re-Imagining Ireland"
documentary film and book will reach an American and international
audience of millions, introducing new perspectives on Ireland and global
culture, challenging national stereotypes and easy assumptions about
historical and contemporary change. The documentary will be co-produced
by Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Paul Wagner and RTÉ,
Ireland?s national broadcaster, with distribution support from South
Carolina ETV. The project book, a group of commissioned essays with
photo illustrations, is under contract with the University of Virginia
Press. The entire program package will, for years to come, attract
people interested in Ireland generally, issues of globalization, and
Irish studies.

Complete program information on "Re-Imagining Ireland" is available at
the project
Web site. The conference is a public event, with free admission to all
panels, but registration will be limited. The fee structure for the
conference package, including meals and all arts events, will be posted
shortly. Those interested in attending can register on-line beginning
Jan. 10. To receive printed bulletins or registration materials when
available, please e-mail re-imagine-ir[at]virginia.edu. Tickets for
individual events, including concerts, film screenings, Foley, and other
performances, will be available on-line and by mail beginning March 1.

From: "Richard Jensen"
To:
Subject: Fw: Barber on Canny, _Making Ireland British_


- ----- Original Message -----
From: "H-Net Reviews"
To:
Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2002 1:22 PM
Subject: Barber on Canny, _Making Ireland British_


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion[at]h-net.msu.edu (August, 2002)

Nicholas Canny. _Making Ireland British, 1580-1650_. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001. xiv + 633 pp. Maps, index. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-19-820091-9.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Sarah Barber ,
Department of History, Lancaster University

Nicholas Canny hints at the importance of this book within work on Irish
history in recent decades, when he notes that the book "has been so long
in the making" (p. vii). It is a culmination, a summation, and a
justification of a career which, again by Canny's own admission, has
been marked by controversy. He claims to be unaware of the reason for
his fame, but speculates that it has come about because he is
uncategorizable. Rather than swim with the fishes in a pool stocked with
like-minded historians of a particular school, he chooses instead the
solitary life. He is a scholar whose dialogue is with his sources.

Nevertheless, the sources which Canny chooses to prioritize, like those
of any other historian, describe the waters the scholar chooses to
explore. His chronology underpins a conscious process of "making Ireland
British." The key, transformative period began with the new settlers of
the Munster plantation of the 1580s and was already reaching its
conclusion when conqueror Cromwell arrived in August 1649. "Making
Ireland British" was therefore, a process whereby political allegiance
was shaped by settlement and cultural assumption, rather than by
conquest and military imposition. By the time that the English
parliamentarian army came to Ireland, to mop up the unrest that had been
inflamed by the rebellion of the winter of 1641, Ireland, it is implied,
was already "British."

This emphasis on a process of acculturation explains Canny's willingness
to trawl widely, refusing to dismiss as ahistorical material from any
genre. Canny's key historical witness, therefore, to the attitudes
which English commentators brought to Ireland in the late sixteenth
century, is the courtier, politician, poet, and moral philosopher,
Edmund Spenser. Both the _View of the Present State of Ireland_ and
_The Faerie Queene_ are examined for what they can tell the historian
about the "British" presence in Ireland. The civil servants, soldiers
and minor officials who attempted to manage Ireland are seen in
Spenser's mould.

This approach leads us to a number of interesting speculations about
Canny's view of Irish history. He chose not to present a narrative of
all of the attempts at plantation, starting with that of Leix/Offaly.
Neither does he treat the Connacht plantation in the same way as those
of Munster and Ulster, choosing rather to subsume plantation within a
wider context of Wentworth's policy. Is the implication, therefore,
that unlike, for example, Karl Bottigheimer, Canny does not see
plantation as the vehicle by which Anglicization was driven through
Ireland?

Secondly, Canny's view does not imply a cumulative process of
Anglicization which was, ironically, crowned by Cromwell's military
presence or by the subsequent settlement that bears his name. What,
then, was the purpose of the Cromwellian presence in Ireland? Was it a
means to enforce a policy many had already assumed to be implemented?
Was it a recognition that cultural change had been so unsuccessful that
only its forcible execution by the musket would do? Was it really a
battle between royalists and their opponents that owed more to the
English crisis but which was played out on Irish soil? Was it the means
to accelerate and finish the plantation, transplantation and
transportation of bodies? For Canny, the Cromwellian settlement was a
means to impose Anglicization because the survival of Irish culture and
religion seemed to show the failure of past policies. This meant the
transplantation of English and Scottish settlers who would inherently
reject Irishness because their Protestantism was unshakeable. It meant
the marginalization of the Old English, whose loyalty to Britishness was
compromised by their stubborn (for which read "wilful") refusal to
reject Rome. It meant the transplantation of British communities, the
representatives of which would act as exemplars, mentors, administrators
and enforcers of a new culture onto the majority of the Irish people.

Edmund Spenser provided the model for what should be done in times of
crisis: that an Irish man should "in short time learn quite to forget
his Irish nation" (p. 577). Here lies the crux of Canny's view of Irish
history, its controversy, and the reason for its poor fit into
traditional historical schools. Spenser provides the theoretical ideal
against which the plantation schemes of Munster and Ulster and the
policy of Thomas Wentworth should be measured. Hence there are sections
on the first two of these which explore the theory of plantation and
then the practice. Spenser's vision is presented as a successful reality
by 1640. A new breed of lord--the Boyles, the Cootes, and the
Percevals--governed on behalf of a centralized authority, having
jurisdiction over a wealth of minor officials. Trade and economic
development was organised to benefit London markets as part of an
interdependent British network.

Some historians of Ireland would not agree that Spenser's view of
Ireland was typical. Here, it is presupposed, and indeed, stated
explicitly, that there was a policy: systematic, continuous, and part
of a "grand ambition." By starting with Spenser, a man who directed the
chief virtues of poetry and history towards a vision, this narrative is
given force, life, and a personification. The alternative account is
that English/British political influence and physical presence in
Ireland was a series of _ad hoc_ responses to the latest crisis of its
authority. The end result may well have been the same, but achieved by
a series of blunders and reverses: typical British incompetence, not
typical British imperialism. Spenser is Canny's weapon in a plan to
scotch this view. Placing so much responsibility onto one pair of
shoulders is a risky strategy, but one which lends force to Canny's
narrative and provides an accessible route into the controversial
complexities of contemporary Irish historiography. Structuring a
history of Ireland in this way may well have lost some of the subtleties
of the argument, but Canny is a man with a mission which lends itself to
a different craft.

Copyright (c) 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks[at]mail.h-net.msu.edu.

From:
To: irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Ir-D 'Re-Imagining Ireland' Virginia, May 2003


Given the radical negative turnaround in Ireland's economic fortunes
since the last General Election, I'm sure that, like the rest of us
here, President MacAleese will have no difficulty whatsoever in
'Re-imagining Ireland' by the time this conference commences next May.

In fact, an imaginative contributor might even consider preparing a
timely paper on the next exodus of impoverished Paddies about to swell
the diaspora!

Happy Christmas and best wishes to all fellow Ir-D members.

Ultan Cowley











irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk wrote:

<
< For Information...
<
< P.O'S.
<
< {http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/ireland_conference.html}
<
< PRESS RELEASE FROM University of Virginia...
<
< Dec. 6, 2002 ? President Mary McAleese of Ireland will keynote <
"Re-Imagining Ireland: Transformations of Identity in a Global Context",
< the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities? groundbreaking
international < conference and festival, to be held May 7-10, 2003 in
Charlottesville. < With funding from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and < Ireland?s Cultural Relations Committee, this unique
gathering will < feature more than 100 journalists, writers,
politicians, artists, < scholars, musicians, and citizen activists from
Ireland and around the < U.S.
<
< A town meeting of Ireland, out of Ireland, "Re-Imagining Ireland"
will < explore the relation between global economics and traditional
culture, < the challenges and opportunities posed by the worldwide
migration of < national populations, and connections between religious
and political < identity and issues of war and peace. Focusing
attention on Ireland?s < and Northern Ireland?s changing profile in a
global context, the program < will have particular relevance for an
American audience, speaking to < their country?s role in the world of
the future.
<
< ?'Re-Imagining Ireland' has been planned as a kind of ?time-out? on <
neutral ground,? says project director Andrew Higgins Wyndham. ?We want
< to take people out of place, routine, and mind-set, to a new
environment < in America, where for four days they will exclusively
focus on, analyze, < and appreciate Irish culture, both in itself and
in relation to America < and other parts of the world.?
<
< The conference and festival schedule includes 31 thematically
organized < panel sessions and special activities. On the roster are
two major < concerts, a series of musical narratives, an award-winning
play, a new < Irish feature film and series of short films, readings by
major Irish < poets, and an exhibition of contemporary Irish art. The
program will < accommodate 450 participants and featured guests from
Ireland and < throughout the United States, with larger audiences,
ranging up to 900, < at special events. A broadcast documentary film
and published book will < extend the life and reach of the program. <
< Mary McAleese, the opening speaker, is the eighth President of the <
Republic of Ireland and the first to come from Northern Ireland. A <
barrister and former professor of law, she was graduated in law from the
< Queen's University, Belfast, in 1973 and was called to the Northern <
Ireland Bar in 1974. In 1975, she was appointed Reid Professor of <
Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin. In <
1987, she returned to her alma mater, to become Director of the <
Institute of Professional Legal Studies. In 1994, she became the first <
female Pro-Vice Chancellor of Queen's University. President McAleese is
< also an experienced broadcaster, having worked as a current affairs <
journalist and presenter in radio and television with Radio Telefís <
Éireann, Ireland?s national broadcaster. <
< Among the 102 other participants slated to appear at the conference
are < such award-winning writers and poets as Frank McCourt, Roddy
Doyle, < Nuala O?Faolain, Colm Toibin, Ciaran Carson, Paula Meehan, and
Cathal O < Searcaigh; renowned musicians, including Frankie Gavin,
Seamus Egan, < Mick Moloney, Andy Irvine, Joannie Madden, Martin Hayes,
Tommy Sands, < Bruce Molsky, and Len Graham and Pádraigín Ní
Uallacháin; celebrated < historians, including Declan Kiberd, Joe Lee,
Kerby Miller, Donald < Akenson, Tim Pat Coogan, Marianne Elliott, Roy
Foster, and Noel < Ignatiev; respected journalists and authors Susan
McKay, Jacki Lyden, < Eamonn McCann, David McKittrick, and Fintan
O?Toole; and such well-known < activists and politicians as Margaret
Mac Curtain, Michael D. Higgins < and David Ervine. Participants will
also include economists, prominent < business and cultural leaders,
clergy, Irish Travelers (sometimes < referred to as ?tinkers? or
gypsies), and representatives of the news < media.
<
< Major arts events will include concerts by ?De Dannan? and ?The Green
< Fields of America? and by ?Solas? and ?Cherish the Ladies;? an <
exhibition of contemporary sculpture and painting from the Irish Museum
< of Modern Art, to be presented from April 12 - June 8 at the
University < of Virginia Art Museum; performances of Michael West?s
?Foley,? an < award-winning play starring Abbey actor Andrew Bennett,
from Dublin?s < Corn Exchange and Richard Wakely Productions; a series
of short films < from the Cork International Film Festival; and a new
dramatic feature < film from the Irish Film Board. <
< "Re-Imagining Ireland" is funded by a $200,000 award from the
National < Endowment for the Humanities and a grant of 50,000 Euros
from the < Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland. Additional major
support has < been provided by the Anne Lee Ueltschi Foundation, the
Office of the < President at the University of Virginia, Foras na
Gaeilge in Dublin, < Caterpillar, RBC Dain Rauscher, the U.Va. Forum
for Contemporary < Thought, the Milwaukee Irish Fest Foundation, Peter
Sutherland, and < other individual donors. Dominion Digital of
Charlottesville and < Richmond is contributing the design of the
"Re-Imagining Ireland" Web < site; ServerVault is the pro bono host of
the site. Institutional < co-sponsors include Poetry Ireland, the Film
Board of Ireland, the Cork < International Film Festival, the Irish
Centre for Migration Studies, the < Irish Museum of Modern Art, and
Glucksman Ireland House at New York < University.
<
< Beyond the conference and festival, the "Re-Imagining Ireland" <
documentary film and book will reach an American and international <
audience of millions, introducing new perspectives on Ireland and global
< culture, challenging national stereotypes and easy assumptions about
< historical and contemporary change. The documentary will be
co-produced < by Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Paul
Wagner and RTÉ, < Ireland?s national broadcaster, with distribution
support from South < Carolina ETV. The project book, a group of
commissioned essays with < photo illustrations, is under contract with
the University of Virginia < Press. The entire program package will,
for years to come, attract < people interested in Ireland generally,
issues of globalization, and < Irish studies.
<
< Complete program information on "Re-Imagining Ireland" is available
at < the project
< Web site. The conference is a public event, with free admission to
all < panels, but registration will be limited. The fee structure for
the < conference package, including meals and all arts events, will be
posted < shortly. Those interested in attending can register on-line
beginning < Jan. 10. To receive printed bulletins or registration
materials when < available, please e-mail re-imagine-ir[at]virginia.edu.
Tickets for < individual events, including concerts, film screenings,
Foley, and other < performances, will be available on-line and by mail
beginning March 1.
<
<
<
<
<
<

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

For Information...

News of a new book by Barbara Walsh. The chapter on recruitment - `The
Call' - discusses the regional origins and social and economic
backgrounds of the many Irish women, and those of Irish background, who
were recruited to the religious life in English convents.

P.O'S.


PRESS RELEASE
From
Irish Academic Press

Roman Catholic Nuns in England and Wales,
1800 ? 1937
A Social History
By Barbara Walsh

In the nineteenth and the early twentieth century thousands of young
women chose to live in all-female, Roman Catholic religious communities
in England and Wales. Many of them took hands-on responsibility for the
building, running and staffing of large and complex institutions,
hospitals and schools. Their input, whilst not solely confined to the
needs of the expanding Roman Catholic community, had a significant
impact on the surrounding society at many levels. Yet, for a long time
these women have been perceived as no more than submissive figures in a
patriarchal and hierarchical church. Even today there is still
considerable ignorance about the life and work of female religious
communities in England and Wales. The dynamism and innovative nature of
their early structures and work have only begun to be appreciated.

This timely and intriguing new publication aims to dispel the widely
held misconceptions about women who developed professional careers in
education, health and social care, while at the same time dedicating
themselves to religious life. In this immensely detailed and readable
social history Dr Walsh examines the place of Roman Catholic nuns within
the broad context of nineteenth ?and early twentieth ?century society,
portraying them as proto-feminist career women and also looks at the
convent as a disappearing way of life.

Dr Walsh firstly provides a background of how women?s religious orders
and congregation, suppressed for the most part of the Reformation, were
later re-established or founded as new institutions. She then explains
the nature and extent of nuns? engagement in education, nursing and
social care and convincingly demonstrates how this development affected
all classes of society, including the upper-class Victorian English
women. There follows a discussion about the scope and scale of their
work and the ensuing financial and recruitment demand. Attention is also
accorded to the significant number of young women who emigrated from
Ireland to work as a nun or sister and the contribution they made to
educational and social development in England and Wales.

Catholic religious generally have received a bad press in the last
decade or so. The Catholic Church currently faces many difficulties,
some arising from its secretive and self-protective structures. The
idealism and dedication of many individual religious, and their service
to community life and to society at large - often tainted by the poor
image of religious today - is wonderfully presented in this publication.
Fully illustrated, the book also provides maps and valuable tabulated
data to open up this field of research for social history scholars and
others interested in the achievements of these women.


Barbara Walsh holds a doctorate in history from the University of
Lancaster and lives in County Kildare, Ireland.

Publication Date: 21st November 2002
240 pages 0 7165 2745 6 £32.50
To order a review copy and other press enquires contact: Amna Whiston
Tel 020 8920 2100 email: awhiston[at]frankcass.com

Sender: P.Maume[at]Queens-Belfast.AC.UK
To: irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk
Subject: Road to Perdition -Graphic Novel

From: Patrick Maume
Earlier this year I posted a couple of items on the list about
the ROAD TO PERDITION film. I have been a bit curious about
the original graphic novel and eventually managed to get hold of
a copy last week. A few observations which may be of interest
in terms of representations of the Irish diaspora.
(1)The father in the graphic novel is represented as having
immigrated from Ireland; the film suggests he was born in
America.
(2)The gang boss played by Paul Newman in the film is a much
less sympathetic character in the novel (and much closer to the
historical John Looney). He is fully complicit from the start
in the attempt to kill his former lieutenant and wipe out his
family. The film gives him a familial relationship with the
Hanks character, who is an orphan he has brought up and who gets
involved in the gang out of loyalty to him. In the novel the
relationship is linked to the classic defence of Irish political
bosses and similar characters - that their patronage - at its
very high price - served as a last recourse for desperate
immigrants in a society prejudiced against them; the central
character sees the boss not as his father, but as the
government, with himself as a loyal soldier whose killings are
on the same level as those of a soldier in the Army. I suspect
the image owes something to the stereotype of the
puritan-Catholic IRA man as well as to the more obvious American
image of the wandering lone avenger.
The graphic novel is quite indulgent to this self-image of
the hitman as soldier(he supposedly only kills rival gangsters,
even in his days as a gang employee - pull the other one) ; the
film goes much further in confronting him with the fact that he
is a common murderer. The film also plays down his martial
prowess - he is, after all a fantasy figure, a comic-book hero
who is seen literally killing opponents by the dozen and
emerging unscathed. That wouldn't play on screen.
Part of the reason the Paul Newman character is bulked up in
the film is that much of the "Catholic guilt" material in the
novel is displaced from the Hanks character onto him (see
below). There is no equivalent in the novel to what I thought
was the best scene in the film -where Hanks and Newman confront
one another in the church basement whose darkness, dirt and
broken religious statues represent the state of their souls.
(3)On the other hand, the novel is much more uncompromising
than the film about the long-term consequences for the son of
being drawn into his father's activities. In the novel the son
kills twice in defence of his father. Instead of being brought
up by an elderly farm couple (their characterisation in the film
is based on the maternal uncle and aunt, who get killed off)he
is brought up in a Catholic orphanage. as an adult he becomes a
priest - it is implied that he does this in atonement for his
father's sins and his own.
(Incidentally, did anyone else think that the ending of the
movie unintentionally reiterated a classic nativist theme?
Gangster movies often have an anti-immigrant or assimilationist
undercurrent; it struck me that the makers of the film had
picked up - presumably from earlier fictions and without
realising its full significance - the idea that Catholic
immigrant ghettoes were sinister alien enclaves importing
religious and political tyranny into the republic, and the only
salvation for their inhabitants lay in breaking away from
familial influences and being assimilated to the values of the
Protestant rural and small-town heartland.)
I had heard that the novel was more anti-clerical than the
film, but this doesn't strike me as being the case (though the
father does spell out to his son in considerably more detail
than in the film, why Fr. Callaway's financial dependence on the
Looneys means it would be an extremely bad idea to seek refuge
with him). The father is presented as being haunted by guilt,
aware that he is a sinner, repeatedly praying for those he has
killed and going to Confession to unburden his sins. (This is
an odd touch -someone as knowledgeable and committed to
Catholicism as he is presented ought to know that any absolution
given to him by a priest under the circumstances would be
invalid unless he firmly resolved to stop killing -which he
clearly has no intention of doing.) When fatally wounded he
tells his son to take him to a priest rather than a hospital.
I suspect the view of the novel as anti-clerical may represent
a difference in reception based on whether or not the reader
believes in atonement. A Catholic reader, believing that even
the most heinous crimes could be expiated through repentance,
might see the father as saved by his final repentance and the
son's priesthood as an acceptable sacrifice and vindicating his
father's desire that his son should have a better way of life; a
reader who does not believe such atonement is possible would see
the father as engaging in self-deception through empty ritual
and the son's subsequent life as a living Hell, a futile attempt
to exorcise the horrors in which his father has implicated him.
The invocation of Catholicism is not particularly profound. (I
think it's open to George Orwell's critique of Graham Greene,
that someone living that life for any length of time would
harden their hearts rather than retaining a permanent awareness
of their sins.) I suspect it operates as a functional
equivalent of the samurai code in the Japanese manga on which
the story is based. But then, the image of the samurai code is
partly influenced by John Ford via Kurosawa...
Just a few parting thought for 2002 - I'll be away from my
e-mail unitl early January. Merry Christmas and a Happy New
Year!
PAtrick.
----------------------
patrick maume

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

The organisers of the Basque World Congress have been swamped with
material, they are complaining - and they hold me responsible.

I need to make it clear that the Basque World Congress is a CLOSED,
BASQUE World Congress...

I apologise if my original Ir-D message gave a different impression. It
was not meant to. I simply cited the questions from the Basque World
Congress as but one example of other diasporas' interest in our work. I
had NOT meant that they wanted to see many examples of our work now,
immediately...

People should NOT contact the organisers directly, or send material or
questions to the organisers.

People who have sent messages to the organisers should not expect a
personal reply.

I had hoped that the 'Basque Questions' would spark answers WITHIN the
Irish-Diaspora list. Sarah Morgan has given us one example.

Please let the organisers of the Basque World Congress in peace, so that
they can organise their Congress.

Paddy O'Sullivan


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

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Personal Fax 0044 (0) 709 236 9050

Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/
Irish Diaspora Net Archive http://www.irishdiaspora.net

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Social Sciences and Humanities
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From: Don MacRaild
Subject: 2 x Research assistants required for an Irish in Britain
research project

Dear Paddy,

I hope you don't mind our using the Ir-D list to advertise two one-year
research assistant posts that are available at Northumbria and
Sunderland following a successful bid under the ESRC Research Methods
competition. The jobs, which would suit candidates with an MA, are
currently advertised on www.jobs.ac.uk. There details are listed below.
We are advising candidates to apply for both posts, should they so wish,
so as to maximise opportunity.

Best wishes,


Don MacRaild
Tony Hepburn


Research Assistants (History)
AHRB Centre for North-East England History

A collaborative, project-based research centre, to investigate the
regional character and identity of North-East England.

Research Assistants (History)
Two posts based at Universities of Northumbria and Sunderland Fixed term
one year £13,771 per annum

Following the award of an ESRC grant to work on a project, 'The Isonymic
Analysis of Historical Data: Irish Migrants in Britain, 1851-1901', we
wish to appoint two Research Assistants to work with a team drawn from
the Universities of Durham, Northumbria and Sunderland. The project is
part of the ESRC Research Methods Programme. The principal investigator
for the project is Dr Malcolm Smith of the University of Durham.
Professor A.C.Hepburn of the University of Sunderland and Dr Donald
MacRaild of the University of Northumbria are co-investigators.

One Research Assistant, employed at the University of Northumbria, will
work with Dr MacRaild, mainly gathering data from archives in the north
of England to complement parallel work on demographic sources, such as
the decennial population censuses. The other Research Assistant,
employed at the University of Sunderland, will work with Professor
A.C.Hepburn, mainly gathering material concerning religious divisions
within Irish migrant communities in the north of England, exploiting
English and Irish records. Both researchers will also undertake initial
analysis of qualitative and some quantitative evidence.

You will be educated to Master's level in modern British and/or Irish
History, or a related discipline, and should be able to demonstrate some
knowledge of issues concerning migration and ethnicity in these national
settings.

In addition, you will have good IT skills together with the ability to
work to deadlines.

Interviews for the above posts will be held on Thursday, 23 January
2003.

Further information on the AHRB Centre for North-East England History is
available on http://www.durham.ac.uk/neehi.history/homepage.htm. Further
information on the vacancies and the History Team are available on
http://my.sunderland.ac.uk/web/services/personnel/recruitment

For an informal discussion about these vacancies, please contact Dr Don
MacRaild on 0191 227 3734 or email don.macraild[at]unn.ac.uk or email
tony.hepburn[at]sunderland.ac.uk

Applications for the University of Northumbria post can only be accepted
when made on the official application form which you can request from
our website http://online.unn.ac.uk/central_departments/vacancies, by
telephoning (0191) 227 4321 during office hours or by writing to
Recruitment, Human Resources Department, University of Northumbria at
Newcastle, Ellison Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST. Please quote
reference R46/02

To apply for the University of Sunderland post, submit your CV with a
covering letter, quoting vacancy title and reference number, to the
Personnel Department, University of Sunderland, Langham Tower, Ryhope
Road, Sunderland, SR2 7EE or email
employee.recruitment[at]sunderland.ac.uk. Please quote reference ADMR13/01

Closing Date: 10 January 2003

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Can I just add my voice to others, and wish all members of the
Irish-Diaspora list and their families a happy and peaceful Christmas,
and wishes for a productive and scholarly New Year.

Our thoughts are especially with those for whom the holiday and the
turning of the year are a time of sadness or remembering.

I have a number of items that I think are worth distributing and
slotting into the archive. So I am going to keep posting messages to
Ir-D over the holiday period - since I work from home this is not
difficult. And other members of the list who are near their computers
should feel free to post messages.

I will also be catching up on my correspondence, after the hurly-burly
of past months, and sending messages to all those who are owed messages.
With the usual apologies...

So, from my book-lined attic in Heaton, Bradford, Yorkshire - with, on
the CD player, The Voice Squad (Fran McPhail, Phil Callery, Gerry
Cullen) singing 'The Parting Glass'...

Paddy O'Sullivan


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

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Personal Fax 0044 (0) 709 236 9050

Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/
Irish Diaspora Net Archive http://www.irishdiaspora.net

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Social Sciences and Humanities
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From: "Richard Jensen"
Subject: an Italian view of Irish gangs

FROM
The New York Times December 20, 2002
To Feel a City Seethe as Modernity Is Born
By A. O. SCOTT

"GANGS OF NEW YORK," Martin Scorsese's brutal, flawed and indelible epic
of 19th-century urban criminality, begins in a mud-walled, torchlighted
cavern, where a group of warriors prepare for battle, arming themselves
with clubs and blades and armoring themselves in motley leather and
cloth. Though this is Lower Manhattan in 1846, it might as well be the
Middle Ages or the time of Gilgamesh: these warlike rituals have an
archaic, archetypal feeling.

And the participants are aware of this. As the members of various
colorfully named Irish gangs emerge into the winter daylight of Paradise
Square (a place long since given over to high-rises and resurrected here
on the grounds of the vast Cinecittà studio complex in Rome), their
native-born Protestant enemies greet them with an invocation of "the
ancient laws of combat." The ensuing melee turns the new-fallen snow
pink with blood and claims the life of Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), an
Irish gang chieftain whose young son witnesses the carnage.

Sixteen years later, the boy, whose name is Amsterdam, has grown into
Leonardo DiCaprio, his wide, implacable face framed by lank hair and a
wispy Van Dyke. He returns from a long stint in the Hell Gate
Reformatory to his old neighborhood, the Five Points, and finds it ruled
by his father's killer, Bill Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), known as the
Butcher, a swaggering monster who has turned the anniversary of Priest's
death into a local holiday.

Like a figure out of Jacobean theater or a Dumas novel, Amsterdam is
consumed by the need for revenge. With the help of a boyhood friend
(Henry Thomas), he infiltrates the Butcher's inner circle, becoming a
surrogate son to the man who assassinated his father and who now, in
accordance with those ancient laws, venerates Priest's memory.

The New York evoked in Amsterdam's voice-over is "a city full of tribes
and war chiefs," whose streets are far meaner than any Mr. Scorsese has
contemplated before. The Butcher has formed an alliance of convenience
with Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent), the kingpin of Tammany Hall, and
together they administer an empire of graft, extortion and larceny that
would put any 20th-century movie gangster or political boss to shame.
Rival fire companies turn burning buildings into sites of rioting and
plunder; crowds gather to witness hangings, bare-knuckled boxing
contests and displays of knife throwing.

As new immigrants, from Ireland and elsewhere, pour off the ships in New
York harbor, they are mustered into Tweed's Democratic Party and then,
since they lack the $300 necessary to buy their way out, into the Union
Army. Occasionally a detachment of reform-minded swells will tour the
Points, availing themselves of the perennial privileges of squeamish
titillation and easy moral superiority. This anarchic inferno is, in
Amsterdam's words, not so much a city as "a cauldron in which a great
city might be forged."

And in recreating it, Mr. Scorsese has made a near-great movie. His
interest in violence, both random and organized, is matched by his love
of street-level spectacle. His Old New York is a gaudy multiethnic
carnival of misrule, music and impromptu theater, a Breughel painting
come to life. Though the details of this lawless, teeming, vibrant
milieu may be unfamiliar, we nonetheless instinctively recognize it,
from the 19th-century novels of Dickens and Zola, from samurai movies
and American westerns and from some of this director's previous films.

Most notably in "Mean Streets, "Goodfellas," "The Age of Innocence" and
"Casino," Mr. Scorsese has functioned as a kind of romantic visual
anthropologist, fascinated by tribal lore and language, by
half-acknowledged codes of honor and retribution and by the boundaries
between loyalty and vengeance, between courtesy and violence, that
underlie a given social order.

As in "Casino" and "The Age of Innocence," the setting of "Gangs" is
sometimes more interesting than the story. At 2 hours 45 minutes, the
film, deftly edited by Mr. Scorsese's frequent collaborator Thelma
Schoonmaker, moves swiftly and elegantly. It is never dull, but I must
confess that I wish it were longer, so that the lives of the
protagonists, rather than standing out in relief against a historical
background, were more fully embedded within it. The quasi-Oedipal
struggle between Amsterdam and Bill is meant to have a mythic resonance,
but that makes it the most conventional element in the picture.

The relationship between the two men is triangulated by Jenny Everdeane
(Cameron Diaz), a flame-haired thief (and a protégée of Bill's) who
catches Amsterdam's eye and steals his lucky religious medallion. But
like Sharon Stone in "Casino," Ms. Diaz ends up with no outlet for her
spitfire energies, since her character is more a structural necessity -
the linchpin of male jealousy - than a fully imagined person. The
limitations of her role point to a more serious lapse, which is the
movie's lack of curiosity about what women's lives might have been like
in Old New York.

Like Tony Soprano's crew in the V.I.P. room at the Bada Bing, Bill and
his minions spend a lot of time cavorting with half-naked prostitutes,
which is fair (and for all I know accurate) enough. But all the glum
evocation of lost fathers makes you wonder if any of these guys had
mothers, and you wonder what a typical household in the Five Points
might have looked like. (Though I, like just about everyone else, had
been waiting impatiently for "Gangs," I almost wish Mr. Scorsese and his
screenwriters had been delayed long enough to take account of "Paradise
Alley," Kevin Baker's new novel about the draft riots of 1863, in which
some of the events touched on in this movie are perceived through
women's eyes.)

These objections should not detract from an appreciation of what Mr.
Scorsese and his cast have done. Mr. DiCaprio and Ms. Diaz may be too
pretty for the neighborhood, but one should hardly hold their being
movie stars against them; they are smart, eager and intrepid actors as
well. For his part Mr. Day-Lewis positively luxuriates in his
character's villainy and turns Bill's flavorsome dialogue into
vernacular poetry.

He understands the Shakespearean dimensions of the character and has
enough art to fill them out. Surrounded by Irish brogues and deracinated
British accents, Mr. Day-Lewis has the wit to speak an early version of
Noo Yawkese, making the Butcher the butt of a marvelous historical joke:
this bigoted, all-but-forgotten nativist, it turns out, bequeathed his
speech patterns to the children of the immigrants he despised.

"Gangs of New York" is an important film as well as an entertaining one.
With this project, Mr. Scorsese has made his passionate ethnographic
sensibility the vehicle of an especially grand ambition. He wants not
only to reconstruct the details of life in a distant era but to
construct, from the ground up, a narrative of historical change, to
explain how we - New Yorkers, Americans, modern folk who disdain
hand-to-hand bloodletting and overt displays of corruption - got from
there to here, how the ancient laws gave way to modern ones.

Such an ambition is rare in American movies, and rarer still is the
sense of tragedy and contradiction that Mr. Scorsese brings to his saga.
There is very little in the history of American cinema to prepare us for
the version of American history Mr. Scorsese presents here. It is not
the usual triumphalist story of moral progress and enlightenment, but
rather a blood-soaked revenger's tale, in which the modern world arrives
in the form of a line of soldiers firing into a crowd.

The director's great accomplishment, the result of three decades of
mulling and research inspired by Herbert Asbury's "Gangs of New York" -
a 1928 book nearly as legendary as the world it illuminates - has been
to bring to life not only the texture of the past but its force and
velocity as well. For all its meticulously imagined costumes and sets
(for which the production designer, Dante Ferretti, surely deserves an
Oscar), this is no costume drama.

It is informed not by the polite antiquarianism of Merchant and Ivory
but by the political ardor of someone like Luchino Visconti, one of Mr.
Scorsese's heroes. "Senso," Visconti's lavish 1953 melodrama set during
the Italian Risorgimento (and his first color film), is one of the
touchstones of "My Voyage to Italy," Mr. Scorsese's fascinating,
quasi-autobiographical documentary on postwar Italian cinema.

Though "Gangs of New York" throws in its lot with the rabble rather than
the aristocracy, it shares with "Senso" (and also with "The Leopard,"
Visconti's 1965 masterpiece) a feeling that the past, so full of
ambiguity and complexity, of barbarism and nobility, continues to send
its aftershocks into the present. It shows us a world on the brink of
vanishing and manages to mourn that world without doubting the
inevitability or the justice of its fate.

"America was born in the streets," the posters for "Gangs" proclaim.
Later, Amsterdam Vallon, in the aftermath of the draft riots, muses that
"our great city was born in blood and tribulation." Nobody as steeped in
film history as Mr. Scorsese could offer such a metaphor without
conjuring the memory of D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," and
Griffith, along with John Ford and others, is one of the targets of Mr.
Scorsese's revisionism.

In Griffith's film, adapted from "The Clansman," a best-selling novel by
Thomas Dixon, the American republic was reborn after Reconstruction,
when the native-born whites of the North and South overcame their
sectional differences in the name of racial supremacy. Ford's myth of
American origins - which involved the subjugation of the frontier and
the equivocal replacement of antique honor by modern justice - also
typically took place after the Civil War.

In "Gangs," which opens nationwide today, the pivotal event in our
history is the riot that convulsed New York in July of 1863. While this
emphasis places the immigrant urban working class at the center of the
American story - a fairly radical notion in itself - the film hardly
sentimentalizes the insurrection, which was both a revolt against local
and federal authority and a vicious massacre of the black citizens of
New York.

The rioters are seen as exploited, oppressed and destined to be cannon
fodder in a war they barely understand, but they are far from heroic,
and the violence of the riots makes the film's opening gang battle seem
quaint and decorous. What we are witnessing is the eclipse of warlordism
and the catastrophic birth of a modern society. Like the old order, the
new one is riven by class resentment, racism and political hypocrisy,
attributes that change their form at every stage of history but that
seem to be as embedded in human nature as the capacity for decency,
solidarity and courage.

This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking
ideology, either liberal or conservative. Mr. Scorsese's bravery and
integrity in advancing this vision can hardly be underestimated.

This movie was a long time in the making, but its life has barely begun.
Now that the industry gossip about it has subsided, let us hope that a
more substantial discussion can start. People who care about American
history, professionally and otherwise, will no doubt weigh in on the
accuracy of its particulars and the validity of its interpretation; they
will also, I hope, revisit some of their own suppositions in light of
its unsparing and uncompromised imagining of the past. I said earlier
that "Gangs of New York" is nearly a great movie. I suspect that, over
time, it will make up the distance.

"Gangs of New York" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or
adult guardian). The pervasiveness of its violence makes you realize how
much New York has changed in a century and a half. On the other hand,
the nudity, profanity and sexual references may lead you to think that
it has barely changed at all.

GANGS OF NEW YORK

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian and
Kenneth Lonergan, based on a story by Mr. Cocks; director of
photography, Michael Ballhaus; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; music by
Howard Shore; production designer, Dante Ferretti; produced by Alberto
Grimaldi and Harvey Weinstein; released by Miramax Films. Running
time: 165 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Leonardo DiCaprio (Amsterdam Vallon), Daniel Day-Lewis (Bill the
Butcher), Cameron Diaz (Jenny Everdeane), Liam Neeson (Priest Vallon),
Jim Broadbent (Boss Tweed), John C. Reilly (Happy Jack), Henry Thomas
(Johnny) and Brendan Gleeson (Monk McGinn).

----------------

From: "Richard Jensen"
To:
Subject: carry me back to Old Five Points

This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 12/20/2002.


Film captures the feeling but not the facts of life in Five Points

By Maureen Dezell, Globe Staff, 12/20/2002

NEW YORK - Set in a stunning re-creation of the slums of Five Points
during the Civil War, Martin Scorsese's 'Gangs of New York' mixes
history, urban legend, and lurid local color to tell an epic story of
how the other half lived in mid-19th-century Manhattan.

The film is filled with larger-than-life historic figures (P. T. Barnum
and Boss Tweed) and legendary lowlifes such as Hellcat Maggie and Bill
the Butcher (played here with terrifying ferocity by Daniel Day-Lewis).
It teems with violence, squalor, and sordid stories of a demimonde past.

Yet for all its verisimilitude, Scorsese's movie, which was inspired by
Herbert Asbury's 1928 cult classic, 'The Gangs of New York,' is hardly
a historic drama.

'`Gangs of New York,' to my mind, is to New York what `Fellini
Satyricon' is to Nero's Rome,' says Joshua Brown, executive director of
the American Social History Project at the City University of New York
Graduate Center and an expert on 19th-century gangs. 'It's visually
mesmerizing and completely loopy. Utterly compelling and completely
nuts.'

Unlike the Civil War film 'Glory,' Scorsese's new movie is 'riddled
with anachronisms and fictionalizations,' both large and small,
contends Peter Quinn, a historian, novelist ('Banished Children of
Eve'), and consultant on public television projects.

In essence, the movie is a story of tribal rivalry and vengeance fought
between Nativists (poor, native-born Americans) and unskilled Irish
immigrants who arrived after fleeing Ireland's Great Famine between 1845
and 1852. But the film conflates and confuses the historic episodes that
defined that era, observes Quinn.

Famine immigrants arrive on New York docks at the outset of the Civil
War in the movie. 'That didn't happen,' notes Quinn. The
Irish-Nativist fracas known as the 'Dead Rabbit/Bowery Boy Riot' took
place in 1857 (two years after Bill the Butcher was murdered), not, as
depicted in the film, during the Civil War Draft Riots of 1863.
Scorsese's version of the Draft Riots culminates with the Union Navy
bombarding Five Points, which did not occur.

'The movie is a lot of fun,' says Kevin Baker, author of 'Paradise
Alley,' a critically acclaimed novel set in Five Points during the
Draft Riots, 'but events have been altered and telescoped. In part,
it's because the whole book is such a concoction of stories about
various gangs that may or may not be based in fact.'

Take the Dead Rabbits, for example. The opening scene of 'Gangs of New
York' takes place in 1846, as Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) leads his
Dead Rabbits out of a hideaway into the wintry glare of a New York City
slum. As his young son Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) watches, Vallon is
attacked and killed by Bill the Butcher. The Dead Rabbits are defeated
and defunct - until Amsterdam returns to Five Points years later and
re-forms them, starting the mayhem and murder all over again.

According to Asbury, the Dead Rabbits were a dangerous clique of thieves
and thugs whose moniker dates to a fight in which someone threw a dead
rabbit into the middle of the fracas. But as Tyler Anbinder points out
in his recent history 'Five Points,' Asbury based this - and much of
the information, legend, and lore he reports as fact - on press clips
from the era. Most reporters used the Nativist Bowery Boys as sources
for their stories on the riots.

The mistaken nomenclature may seem insignificant to most contemporary
moviegoers. But historians say it's critical to understanding - and
re-creating - the 'Gangs of New York' era.

'Asbury comes out of a tradition that views Catholics, the Irish, and
immigrants in general with suspicion,' says Daniel Cassidy, a
historian, filmmaker, and professor of Irish Studies at San Francisco's
New College of California. 'Why such a great artist and director as
Scorsese chose Asbury as his guide into Five Points mystifies me.'

One third of the Famine immigrants spoke Irish, says Cassidy, who is
compiling a book on the etymology of what he says are thousands of Irish
words and phrases that have been absorbed into American slang and
standard English. Dead Rabbit comes from 'dod raibead,' which, in
Irish, means a rowdy, a hulking fellow, a galoot, he asserts.

'Myth becomes fact over a long period of time,' says Brown. 'It's
important to realize how foreign the Irish seemed to native-born
Americans at the time. A lot of them spoke a different language. They
looked really different. They lived in poverty. And they were portrayed
as physically animalistic.'

The Draft Riots of 1863 were the bloodiest civil disturbance in American
history. Workers, most of them Irish, enraged at a new conscription law,
turned on authorities and the population, murdering more than 100
people, including many African-Americans. Many chroniclers have blamed
the episode on Irish racism rather than the fact that a well-off draftee
could buy his way out for $300.

That might as well be $3 million, as Amsterdam notes in 'Gangs of New
York.'

Scorsese makes it clear that the Draft Riots were driven by class rage,
says Baker, but he adds that there are nuances that are inevitably lost.

'The police, almost all of whom were Irish, really held the city
together,' he says. 'And the gang story sort of distorts how the Irish
really came to power in America, which was through organizing.'

As a filmmaker, says Baker, Scorsese 'salvages a tremendous amount of
forgotten and secret history,' including the fact that tap dancing is
an all-American blend of Irish step dancing and the African-American jig
and reel.

'The movie is visually authentic,' says Baker, 'and a tremendous
addition to folklore.'

Maureen Dezell can be reached at dezell[at]globe.com.

From: Brian Lambkin
To: "'irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk'"
Subject: RE: Ir-D The Turning of the Year

Paddy,
why does the line 'if I had money enough to spend ... come to mind?
Happy Christmas from all here.
Brian

- -----Original Message-----

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

...So, from my book-lined attic in Heaton, Bradford, Yorkshire - with,
on the CD player, The Voice Squad (Fran McPhail, Phil Callery, Gerry
Cullen) singing 'The Parting Glass'...

Paddy O'Sullivan

[Moderator's Note...
Brian Lambkin refers to the last verse of the song...

'If I had money enough to spend and leisure time to sit awhile
there is a fair maid in this town who sorely has my heart beguiled...

Full words at
{http://www.chivalry.com/cantaria/lyrics/parting_glass.html}]

From: Dymphna Lonergan
Subject: Re: Ir-D Review, Gangs of New York 2

I am delighted to see from this review that Daniel Cassidy is writing
on Irish words in American English. I eagerly await
its publication. My own study has demonstrated an
Irish language origin for such iconic Australian words
as ?didgeridoo?, ?brumby? and ?sheila?. Many thanks
to the members of the irish-diaspora discussion group
who provided a source of constant stimulation and help
during my research.

Dymphna Lonergan
Flinders University of South Australia

=====
Go raibh tú daibhir i mí-áidh/May you be poor in ill-luck
Agus saibhir i mbeannachtaí/rich in blessings
Go mall ag déanamh namhaid/slow to make enemies
go luath a déanamh carad/quick to make friends

From: "peter holloran"
To:
Subject: Re: Ir-D Irish language words

While awaiting Daniel Cassidy's book, could someone provide a hint now
about some American English words of Irish origin? I can only think of
smithereens and boycott. The curiosity is to much to bear!

Peter Holloran
Worcester State College