History Vault. Ireland in the s With the ratification of the Acts of Union in , Ireland was effectively governed as a colony of Great Britain until its war of independence in the early 20th century. Great Hunger Begins When the crops began to fail in , as a result of P. Recommended for you. The Irish in Boston. Making St. Patrick's Day Foods: Irish Stew. The Irish in Boston About 33 million Americans can trace their roots to Ireland, the small island off the western coast of Europe, which has a population of just 4.
The Irish Brigade More than , Irishmen, most of whom were recent immigrants and many of whom were not yet U. Easter Rising On Easter Monday, April 24, , a group of Irish nationalists proclaimed the establishment of the Irish Republic and, along with some 1, followers, staged a rebellion against the British government in Ireland.
Ellis Island Ellis Island is a historical site that opened in as an immigration station, a purpose it served for more than 60 years until it closed in When Irish-Americans Attacked Canada—With the White House's Blessing In the spring of , a band of Irish-Americans who fought on both sides of the Civil War united to undertake one of the most fantastical missions in military history: invade the British province of Canada, seize the territory and ransom it back to the British for Ireland's See More.
And although they had lived off the land in their home country, the immigrants did not have the skills needed for large-scale farming in the American West. The men took whatever jobs they could find—loading ships at the docks, sweeping streets, cleaning stables.
The women took jobs as servants to the rich or working in textile factories. Most stayed in slum tenements near the ports where they arrived and lived in basements and attics with no water, sanitation, or daylight. Many children took to begging, and men often spent what little money they had on alcohol.
The Irish immigrants were not well-liked and often treated badly. Many unskilled workers feared being put out of work by Irish immigrants willing to work for less than the going rate.
The Irish also faced religious prejudice as almost all of them were Catholic. With the large number of Irish immigrants flooding into the cities, Catholicism came close to being the largest single Christian denomination in the country.
Many Protestants feared that the Irish were under the power of the Pope and could never be truly patriotic Americans. Large numbers of Irish Catholics who had enlisted in the Union Army and fought bravely at the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg came back from the war and found that things were beginning to change. As America became more industrialized after the Civil War, Irish laborers found new, and better-paid, work.
Many worked building railroads and in factories and mines. They helped organize trade unions and led strikes for shorter hours and better pay.
And many became involved in local political machines and began to play a role in city and state politics. The political machines, like Tammany Hall in New York, were associated with the Democratic Party and ran many of the big cities. In return for their political support, the Tammany Hall bosses helped immigrants through the naturalization process and even provided necessities like food and coal in time of emergency. The Irish Catholics ran Tammany Hall for years and helped many poor immigrant groups, including Poles, Italians, and Jews, as well as their own.
The Irish rose out of the ghetto not only because of politics, but also because of education. As the families of Irish immigrants became more prosperous, they were able to send their children to Catholic parochial schools run by the local parishes.
After graduation from high school, many went on to college and then into careers in medicine, law, and business. By , only 15 percent of Irish-American men were still unskilled workers. By the s, the Irish had spread into all spheres of American life. And in , John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the great-grandson of a famine immigrant, was elected president of the United States.
Waves of other immigrants, fleeing poverty and persecution, have followed in their footsteps and slowly found acceptance, and success, in America.
What problems did the Irish face in America? What factors helped them overcome these problems? Which do you think was the most important factor? In this activity, students will role play an Irish family and decide whether or not to immigrate to the United States. Form small groups. Each group should:. Imagine you are an Irish family during the Potato Famine deciding whether to immigrate to America. Using information from the article, discuss the conditions in Ireland, the dangers of the voyage, and the conditions of Irish immigrants in America.
Alumni Volunteers The Boardroom Alumni. Curriculum Materials. Add Event. All of these elements helped to exacerbate the famine. The potato blight or Phytophthora infestans is a fungus that attacks the potato plant leaving the potatoes themselves inedible. It spread from North America to Europe in the s, causing severe hardship among the poor. However, Ireland was much harder hit than other countries; with over a million deaths as a result, compared to about , deaths in all of the rest of Europe.
The blight hit Ireland in and in the late summer and autumn of that year, it was found that the potato crop was spoiled by a dark fungus and the potatoes themselves rendered inedible. About half of the crop failed. This immediately plunged the rural poor into a crisis as they depended almost solely on the potato as their source of food.
What little money or saleable goods they had generally went on paying rent. The failure of the potato in caused great hardship but not yet mass death, as some stores and seed potatoes from the previous year still existed and farmers and fishermen could sell animals, boats or nets or withhold the rent to pay for food, for at least one season.
The potato blight destroyed about half the crop in and virtually all of it in All this might have staved off the catastrophe had the blight not hit again the following year. But in , the potato crop not only failed again, but failed much more severely, with very few healthy potatoes being harvested that autumn. This time the food crisis was much more severe as most poor tenant farmer families now had nothing to fall back on and marked the start of mass starvation and death, made even worse by an unusually cold winter.
Eyewitnesses began to report whole villages lying in their cabins, dying of the fever. The potato crop did not fail that year, but most potato farmers had either not sown seeds in expectation that the potato crop would fail again, did not have any more seeds or had been evicted for failure to pay rent. The result was that hardly any potatoes were harvested for the second year in a row. The potato was the staple diet for the Irish people at the time and was the only food that was affordable for the masses.
Certain grains such as oats and wheat were grown, but were exported by the government as were cattle and pork. In just four years, Irelands was on its knees. Over a million of its population would die from disease and starvation and through forced emigration, Irelands' population was reduced by almost a further two million people.
The initial efforts to alleviate the problems brought on by the failure of the potato crop were slow to be organised. As was mentioned earlier, it was not unusual to have a potato crop fail.
People lived on their reserves and shared with those that were better of.
0コメント