This festschrift honors the career of Catherine B. Shannon, emerita professor of history at Westfield State College. Like most scholars who receive a festschrift, Shannon has made significant contributions to her fields of study, in her case Anglo-Irish relations at the turn of the twentieth century, Irish women's political activism, and famine-era migration to the US. What sets Shannon apart is her equally distinguished record as a scholar-activist. For years, Shannon worked tirelessly as a mediator between Irish American groups and groups in Northern Ireland (particularly women's organizations) helping to advance the peace process from the darkest days of the Troubles through and beyond the Good Friday Agreement.
Edited by Mary C. Kelly, this fine collection of essays honors Shannon, but also works to advance the fields in which she made her mark. These essays build on recent approaches and frameworks to transatlantic movement which position the Atlantic as both a great highway and a border for the global Irish, exploring various conceptions of Irishness and Irish identity in both Ireland and the US. The book is divided into three sections. The first part focuses on some key themes in the history of the Irish Atlantic, focusing primarily on the American side. Part two explores various manifestations and questions of Irish identity, looking mainly at the Irish side. The third section celebrates the scholarship, advocacy, and friendship of Shannon herself, a bridge between these Atlantic worlds.
On the whole, this is a solid compilation of essays that explore a wide range of topics but still relate well to the overall themes of the book. Several of these chapters stood out to this reviewer, but doubtless this reflects my own interests and is no slight on the others that could not be covered in a short review. David Doolin's essay on Ireland, America, and transnational radicalism offers a pithy and useful short history of US-based physical force nationalists from the Fenians to 1916. Building on the work of David Brundage, Niall Whelehan, and others, Doolin explores how these transatlantic radicals viewed themselves as a “nation without boundaries,” that was simultaneously both Irish and American (50). As Doolin argues, these revolutionaries played a long game, cognizant that they did not represent majority opinion in Ireland or America but also convinced that action was required in order to begin to shift this opinion. While their operations, such as the invasion of Canada or the dynamite campaign in the 1880s, are frequently dismissed as farces or failures, Doolin persuasively argues that they should be considered in the same light as the Easter Rising, all part of the same long trajectory in which every attempt to win Irish independence failed but built on those before it, until one succeeded.
Christine Kinealy's chapter explores the short life and political activism of Fanny Parnell, the least studied of the Parnell siblings. Fanny was best known to contemporaries for her poetry, first published in America but then quickly reprinted in Ireland. As Kinealy argues, however, Fanny's most significant contribution was the idea to create the Ladies’ Land League. Under the leadership of her sister Anna, it played a critical role in the Land War in late 1881 to early 1882 when most of the male leadership was in prison. Kinealy's short study of Fanny Parnell offers a useful model for future works of recovery of the forgotten or obscured lives and work of Irish women activists.
With characteristic style and skill, Kerby Miller's essay challenges recent trends in the study of female Irish migration to America which depict them as willingly leaving behind a patriarchal Ireland to find freedom in America, most typically as domestic servants in middle-class homes. As he argues, this approach tends to rely on or reinforce current dominant paradigms of neoliberalism and American exceptionalism, downplaying or denying the role of class and class conflict in history and in these women's lives. Miller's examination of the lives and some letters of two such Irish women suggests that scholars may be overstating the agency and fulfillment that Irish female migrants experienced in their new homes. As he points out, the most common push factors in Irish women's emigration were the economic strategies and calculation of their parents, not their own discontent with life in Ireland. He further suggests that the homesickness and alienation his subjects felt in America was perhaps less a failure or refusal to adapt on their part than a vague but palpable discontent with the values and practices of American capitalist society.
Part two also offers several notable essays. Among these is Michael Doorley's study of John Devoy's Gaelic American in the 1920s. As Doorley demonstrates, Devoy and his paper consistently fiercely defended Irish cultural identity, resisting anglicization in Ireland and Anglo-Saxon assimilationist pressure in America in equal measure. As he also shows, while the paper was a tireless advocate of Irish independence, it also had other, American-centered concerns. Diarmid Ferriter makes a persuasive case that historians need to look beyond the censorship controversy when considering the life and work of John McGahern. As Ferriter argues, McGahern's works offer incredibly powerful if often bleak insights into the thwarted ambitions and suffering that marked the lives of so many in twentieth-century Ireland. Matt O'Brien's study of the local press and Boston bussing crisis reminds of the need to appreciate the nuance and range of opinion in the local papers as well as the tensions between neighborhood loyalties and aspirations for respectability in understanding both contemporary reaction and contests over the memory of the crisis.
Kelly and the authors are to be congratulated for this excellent collection, a well-deserved honor for a generous and influential scholar who has given so much to her students, peers, and the communities of the Boston area and Northern Ireland.
