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

“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

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.

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

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

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

In August 1845, a young fugitive slave arrived in Dublin to oversee the publication of his bestselling life story, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself.

On September 20th, 1803, twenty-five-year-old Robert Emmet was executed for leading an abortive Irish rebellion; his grave was unmarked to erase his name from history. At his sentencing, a stoic

Between 1820 and 1920, about five million Irish crossed the Atlantic. Almost all faced formidable challenges, but the wave of two million arriving between 1845 and 1860 in the wake

In 1867 forty Irish American freedom fighters, outfitted with guns and ammunition, sailed to Ireland to join the effort to end British rule. They never got a chance to fight

Ernie O'Malley was a medical student in Dublin when the Irish Rebellion broke out in April 1916. He immediately joined the fray in Dublin and was quickly promoted in the

Did you know that after the Civil War an Irish-American army attacked Canada with the plan of holding it hostage and ransoming it for Ireland’s independence? It is no blarney.