James R. Barrett, "The Irish Way"

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James R. Barrett, "The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City" (2012)

(위 표지 사진은 'Student Strike': 학교 앞에서 시위하는 소년들)

 

James R. Barrett is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

책 겉표지 안쪽에서:

 

James R. Barrett chronicles how a new urban American identity was forged in the streets, saloons, churches, and workplaces of the American city. This process of "Americanization from the bottom up" was deeply shaped. Barrett argues, by the Irish. From Lower Manhattan to the South Side of Chicago to Boston's North End, newer waves of immigrants and African Americans found it nearly impossible to avoid the entrenched Irish.... Barrett makes the original case that the culture absorbed by newcomers reaching American shores had a distinctly Hibernian cast.

 

   Barrett reveals how the Irish vacillated between a progressive and idealistic impulse toward their fellow immigrnats and a parochial defensiveness stemming from the hostility earlier generations had faced upon their own arrival in America.... Yet the social teachings of the Catholic Church, a sense of solidarity with the oppressed, and the dark memories of poverty and violence in both Ireland and America ushered in a wave of progressive political activism that eventually embraced other immigrants.

 

책에서:

 

The Irish were America's first ethnic group, and their deepest roots lay in rural Ireland. They saw themselves as a diasporic people -- exiled from their homes by cruel fate and brutish English colonizers. The Great Famine of 1845-52 haunted their communities for decades -- it cost Ireland more than half of its population through disease, starvation, and migration. The human dimensions of this searing catastrophe account for the grim determination with which the Irish went about carving out a place in American society. (p. 3)

 

Tempered by by repression and discrimination, first under British colonialism and then in the face of American nativism, Catholicism pervaded daily life in Irish American communities, as it did that of many later immigrants, especilly Italians and Poles. Anticlericalism flourished in some wings of the Irish nationalist movement, but the oerwhelming majority of immigrants and their children were devout. (p. 7)

 

[At the "Great Patriotic Strike" of 1920] women pickets marched with signs proclaiming, "The Emancipation of the Irish is the Emancipation of All Mankind." (p. 269) --- [오늘, 또는 지난 반세기의 어느 해, 'the Irish'를 대체할 단어는?] 

 

At the core of Irish influence in American city was what sociologists have come to call social capital.... [Sociologist John Field writes] "Its central thesis can be summed up in two words: relationships matter." (p. 282)

 

Irish women's strong sense of social responsibility was born in Ireland and nuttured in the Catholic enclaves of the urban United States. They married other immigrants more often than did their counterparts in other ethnic communities, and they carried Irish values into these ethnically mixed families. They cared for immigrant youth in Catholic orphanages and settlement houses. As teachers and teaching nuns in public and parochial schools, they taught new immigrant, black migrant, and later Mexican migrant children and served them as nurses and nursing sisters. As early suffragists and union organizers, they provided contacts with middle-class reformers and drew working-class people into social and reform movements. (p. 286)