9 - Forging a Shared Identity: Irish Migrants and Steel Cities, 1850–1900

Summary

Ruminations on the spaces of Irish history have been increasingly widespread in recent years. In a recent essay in the Dublin Review of Books, Breandán Mac Suibhne discussed those ‘patches’ of the U.S.A. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which Irish culture had resonated. Originally a term that denoted a ‘cluster of shacks on a colliery’, patches came to represent so much more. They were, Mac Suibhne argued, spaces where the fiddle held sway, and the wise woman and the keener of much older cultural traditions practised their arts. In a similar vein, in a contemplative article in the Journal of American Ethnic History, published in 2009, Timothy Meagher mused over the question, ‘How much more is there to learn about Irish Americans?’ The problem, Meagher determined, was one of scope. Too many studies of Irish migrants in the U.S.A. were clustered on the urban centres of the Eastern Seaboard in the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century. The ‘really exciting’ possibilities lay, he concluded, in the broadening out of these areas of investigation, through extending studies either into the centuries preceding and following the intense period of post-famine migration or into wider geographical comparatives as exemplified by Malcolm Campbell's Ireland's new worlds. Campbell's work, comparing Irish migration to the Pacific Coast of America and to Australia, was an attempt to question the often unintentional explanation of Irish immigrant experiences ‘in terms of their Irishness, as though this constitutes a homogenous, coherent, and constant phenomenon’. Irish experiences, Campbell observed, extended well beyond the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S.A., encompassing a variety of urban and rural settings. Each of these spaces shaped the nature of Irish migration in different ways.

Selecting which spaces to examine, however, is more difficult. The issue has been particularly relevant in the developing field of transnational history. Connecting the different scales involved in such an enterprise, from the oceanic to the neighbourhood, is complex and challenging. The move away from the nation state as a unit of analysis has left historians with a ‘container concept’ mentality, as Michael Müller and Cornelius Torp have argued; one that still exhibits a preference for the defined and lasting space as a unit of analysis. Moving beyond established borders, despite established historical tradition, is a hard task. ‘[A]ll historical phenomena have to be studied within their own geographical frameworks’, allowing a more organic approach to transnational history.