As farmers and laborers, policemen and politicians, maids and seamstresses, Irish immigrants' hard work helped to build the state. Author Ann Regan examines their history and tells the diverse stories of the Irish in Minnesota.
Women Writing the West WILLA Award Finalist From “the reigning royalty of Minnesota murder mysteries” (The Rake) comes a striking new heroine: a young Irish immigrant caught up in a deadly plot in nineteenth-century Deadwood When I was fifteen and my brother Seamus sixteen, we attended our own wake. Our family was in mourning, forced to send us off to America. The year is 1880, and of all the places Brigid Reardon and her brother might have dreamed of when escaping Ireland’s potato famine by moving to America, Deadwood, South Dakota, was not one of them. But Deadwood, in the grip of gold fever, is where Seamus lands and where Brigid joins him after eluding the unwanted attentions of the son of her rich employer in St. Paul—or so she hopes. But the morning after her arrival, a grisly tragedy occurs; Seamus, suspected of the crime, flees, and Brigid is left to clear his name and to manage his mining claim, which suddenly looks more valuable and complicated than he and his partners supposed. Mary Logue, author of the popular Claire Watkins mysteries, brings her signature brio and nerve to this story of a young Irish woman turned reluctant sleuth as she tries to make her way in a strange and often dangerous new world. From the famine-stricken city of Galway to the bustling New York harbor, to the mansions of Summit Avenue in St. Paul, and finally to the raucous hustle of boomtown Deadwood, Logue’s new thriller conjures the romance and the perils, and the tricky everyday realities, of a young immigrant surviving by her wits and grace in nineteenth-century America.
This book shows the interplay between the major groups traveling the roads and waterways of the Upper Mississippi Valley during the crucial decades of 1830 - 1860. It's a lively, extensively-illustrated account which will help Americans everywhere better understand their diverse heritage.
A brilliant true crime account of the assassinations that altered the course of Irish history from the “compulsively readable” writer (The Guardian). One sunlit evening, May 6, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were funded by American supporters of Irish independence and carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans armed with specially made surgeon’s blades. They put an end to the new spirit of goodwill that had been burgeoning between British Prime Minister William Gladstone and Ireland’s leader Charles Stewart Parnell as the men forged a secret pact to achieve peace and independence in Ireland—with the newly appointed Cavendish, Gladstone’s protégé, to play an instrumental role in helping to do so. In a story that spans Donegal, Dublin, London, Paris, New York, Cannes, and Cape Town, Julie Kavanagh thrillingly traces the crucial events that came before and after the murders. From the adulterous affair that caused Parnell’s downfall; to Queen Victoria’s prurient obsession with the assassinations; to the investigation spearheaded by Superintendent John Mallon, also known as the “Irish Sherlock Holmes,” culminating in the eventual betrayal and clandestine escape of leading Invincible James Carey and his murder on the high seas, The Irish Assassins brings us intimately into this fascinating story that shaped Irish politics and engulfed an Empire. Praise for Julie Kavanagh’s Nureyev: The Life “Easily the best biography of the year.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “The definitive biography of ballet’s greatest star whose ego was as supersized as his talent.” —Tina Brown, award-winning journalist and author
The Great Hunger of 1845 to 1852 cast a long shadow over the subsequent history of Ireland and its diaspora. Since 1995, there has been a renewed interest in studying this event, not only by history scholars and students, but by archeologists, artists, musicians, scientists, folklorists, etc., all of which has added greatly to our understanding of this tragic event.The focus on the Great Hunger, however, has overshadowed other periods of famine and food shortages in Ireland and their impact on a society in which poverty, hunger, emigration and even excess mortality, were part of the life cycle and not unique to the 1840s. This publication re-examines some of the forgotten famines that not only shaped Ireland's history, but the histories of the many countries in which successive waves of emigrants chose to settle.
This book brings together a series of articles which provide an overview of the Irish Diaspora from a global perspective. It combines a series of survey articles on the major destinations of the Diaspora; the USA, Britian and the British Empire. On each of these, there is a number of more specialist articles by historians, demographers, economists, sociologists and geographers. The inter-disciplinary approach of the book, with a strong historical and modern focus, provides the first comprehensive survey of the topic.