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Ireland and Irish Emigration to the New World: from 1815 to the FamineIreland and Irish Emigration to the New World: from 1815 to the Famine. William Forbes Adams. Softcover, (1932), repr. 2004, New, 444 pp.
Mass immigration to the U.S. was nowhere more apparent than in the immigration of the Irish between 1815 and the failure of the potato crop in 1845/1846, during which time a million Irish men and women crossed the seas to take up permanent residence in America. This work is concerned with the roots of that immigration, and it provides a detailed account of the economic, social, and political factors underlying the early migrations, an examination of the emigrant trade and its links with American shipping interests, and a history of government policy regarding assisted and unassisted emigration. Professor Adams here succeeds in treating a complex subject in both an exhaustive and engaging manner, placing the history of Irish emigration on a firm, scholarly basis, dispelling myths, marshalling facts, weighing cause and effect. His work is both a monument to painstaking research and a testament to the determination of a great people in the vanguard of an epoch-making emigration. 45-C |