“Why didn’t the Irish fish when the potato crop failed during the Great Hunger of the late 1840s?” is a perennial question asked by the perplexed in a modern world with a global infrastructure. An examination of one family’s migration from an Irish-speaking fishing village in County Waterford to the American seaport of Gloucester, Massachusetts,

Newport is well known as having been a religiously diverse and tolerant city in the colonial era. Newporter’s accepted Baptists, Quakers and Jews into their midst in the seventeenth century. The welcome did not extend to Catholics, however. Pamphlets and sermons often warned residents of the dangers of “popery” and effigies of the pope were

While there was remarkable success among those Irish who arrived on American shores sickly and unskilled, for a great many it would be generations before the hopes they had for their children would be fulfilled. This reality was based on the newcomers’ social and economic situation, the general distrust by Americans of foreigners, and the

Starting in 1836, after enjoying ten years of relatively good wages and steady working and living conditions, the Irish Catholic laborers at Fort Adams were experiencing military, economic and cultural forces that would fundamentally change the character and circumstances of Newport’s Irish community. During the next ten years, from 1836 – 1846, the Irish community

In the most recent U.S. Census survey, 81% of the adult population self-identified a specific ancestry and 10% wrote that they were “Irish.” For Newport County the Irish percentage was 24% and for Newport 27%. How did the strong sense of identity among the Newport Irish persist over generations in the face of anti-Irish sentiment