Irish America

Few writers on the Irish in America have looked beyond the nineteenth-century ethnic enclaves of New York Boston Philadelphia or Chicago or have asked how the notion of an Irish-American ethnic identity in contemporary America can be reconciled with five six or seven generations of intermarriage and assimilation over the last century and a half. This study based on interviews with 500 people of Irish ancestry in Albany New York aims to discover in what senses and in what degrees the present-day descendants of nineteenth-century Irish immigrants possess distinctive social practices and ways of seeing the world and raises questions about the social conditions in which ideas of Irishness have been created and re-created.