Between 1846 and 1851 over 600,000 Famine Irish arrived on ships in the port of New York. Many settled in the neighborhoods along the East and Hudson rivers, creating the Irish waterfront. They found hard work on the docks as longshoremen. New York became the shipping center of the world. In the adjacent immigrant neighborhoods,
Why did over a million people die of starvation and disease, and more than two million leave during roughly six years in mid-1800s Ireland? The label "potato famine" does not begin to explain a crisis that was hundreds of years in the making, and one that happened in the midst of plenty. This 49-minute documentary
A local labor activist once said that the Providence Journal hated unions like the Devil hated holy water! You could easily have substituted “Irish” for “unions” at almost any time in the newspaper's long history. But there were a couple of exceptions. Alfred Williams, a Civil War era reporter, eventually became the paper's editor in