A review of "The Shamrock and the Lily: The New York Irish and the Creation of a Transatlantic Identity, 1845-1921" by Mary C. Kelly (Pre-Published Version)

Abstract

Mary C. Kelly's study of what she terms the creation of “a transatlantic identity” adds much to the broadening study of the Irish American experience in the post‐Famine decades. Her central thesis challenges that of other historians who view the formation of Irish American identity as a consequence of the often embittering Irish immigrant experience in the unfamiliar, alien environment of urban America. Kelly suggests that Ireland was not just a place from which the Irish escaped but that the Irish transported and transplanted social, cultural, and political beliefs and practices to the new world. These products of the ancestral homeland, when fused with the New York identity, gave rise to a “dual‐culture genesis” and the basis of a new nineteenth‐century Atlantic world.