Gilded Age Newport is well-known for its summer colonists and for the “cottages” that they built. However, less attention has been paid to the city’s year-round residents, at least one-third of whom were Irish. For Irish Newporter’s, this was a time of increasing visibility and influence. They were becoming prominent in local politics and in

The complete 1880 U.S. Census illustrates the patterns of Irish settlement in Newport. Because the Census allows us to map Irish immigrants to their individual street addresses, it reveals residential concentrations. Professor Schlichting will identify the emerging Irish neighborhoods of 1880 and his analysis of the census data will provide new insight into “chain migration”

After the defeat of O’Donnell and O’Neil, many of the McGlinchey clan escaped to Donegal in the North, in the early 1600s. Professor Desrosiers’ Irish ancestors, Eliza McGowan and Patrick McGlinchey, lived in Meentaghcallagh near Buncrana in the remote Inishowen Peninsula. When Patrick lost his life in a quarry accident, Eliza found a way to

The music that is broadly defined as Irish has developed in tandem with the media technologies of the past 100 years. From the wax cylinder to the iPod, technology has had a dramatic impact on the preservation, transmission and transformation of music in general and of Irish music in particular, a genre whose roots lie

The Rhode Island Irish Famine Memorial, located on the Riverwalk in downtown Providence, powerfully commemorates the sufferings and triumphs of the two and one half million victims and survivors of Ireland's "Great Famine" of 1845-1851. It also pays a moving tribute in granite, bronze and brick to the successive waves of Irish immigrants who have

A wealthy Protestant landowner from County Wicklow, Charles Stewart Parnell was elected to the House of Commons in 1874 at the age of 29 and quickly rose to the leadership of the Irish Home Rule Party. Highly regarded in Ireland and America as well, Parnell became more influential than any Irish politician before him. In

Documenting an historical past is a complicated process. The chronicle of the Irish in America has been the subject of novels, biographies and films. Family histories preserve a treasured story of a journey to America and then the subsequent struggle for acceptance and upward mobility. Social historians, on the other hand, rely on official records

Historical and literary accounts of a military engagement often unanimously extol one outstanding individual as the hero of the battle or campaign. This, however, is not the case with four works authored in the first two decades after the 1689 siege of Londonderry where a variety of individuals – both male and female, human and

In 1946 a provocative novel about growing up Irish in Rhode Island between 1900 and World War I was authored by Edward McSorley. McSorley had been a journalist with the Providence Journal, as well holding many other diverse jobs. The publication of Our Own Kind, which sold several hundred thousand copies and was a Book

Dotted with deserted monasteries, ruined castles, holy wells and plenty of pubs, St Declan’s Way stretches 100 kilometers (approx. 60 miles) from the iconic Rock of Cashel in South Tipperary, over the beautiful Knockmealdown Mountains, to the Co. Waterford fishing village of Ardmore, the oldest Christian settlement in Ireland, founded 416 AD by St. Declan,

Dr. Patrick Conley has edited a new book to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, entitled The Rhode Island Homefront During the Civil War Era (Rhode Island Publications Society, September 2013). The book contains essays by former chief justice Frank Williams, a nationally acclaimed Lincoln scholar, Prof. Maury Klein, one of America's

Born in Boston’s South End to Irish-immigrant parents, John Lawrence Sullivan (1858-1918) was the last of the bare-knuckle heavyweight boxing champions. He was the first American athlete to earn over one million dollars, the first American sports “superstar,” and an Irish-American hero during the Gilded Age. Writer Christopher Klein has published a new book on