Who was the Irish Bridget? What relevance does her story have to the history of Irish immigration to America? Learn the answers to these questions in Dr. Margaret Lynch-Brennan’s presentation “The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840-1930” which is based on her book of the same name. The young Irish
On April 8, 1824, the Newport Mercury announced, “We learn, that surveys are now being completed by an officer of the Engineer Corps, preparatory to commencing and extending the works at Fort Adams, (Brenton’s Point,) in this harbor." Over the next 20 years, the construction of this massive, state of the art fortification would change
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
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
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,
