Museum of Newport Irish History | Newport, Rhode Island

Rebecca L. Abbott. MFA., Prof. of Communications, Dept. of Film, TV & Media at Quinnipiac U. and Christine Kinealy, Ph.D, founding Dir. of "Ireland's Great Hunger Institute" at Quinnipiac, will host the documentary film: "Ireland's Great Hunger and the Irish Diaspora"
2017-03-28 18:00 UTC
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 film, narrated by actor Gabriel Byrne, explores not just the potato failure that led to mass starvation, death, and emigration in Ireland from 1845 to 1852, but also examines the historical, social, and political circumstances that made the great famine almost inevitable. The film views the history of An Gorta Mór – the great hunger — through the eyes of descendants of those who survived it, and descendants of those who fled Ireland through the Canadian quarantine station at Grosse Ile, Quebec in 1847. Also included are those whose maternal ancestors emigrated to Australia under the Earl Grey scheme, 1848–52, along with the voices of several leading scholars of Irish history.
Dr. Christine Kinealy, widely published author and authority on Irish history, and filmmaker, Prof. Rebecca Abbott, will be present to introduce the film, and to lead discussion and answer questions afterwards. Copies of the film will be available for sale after the presentation.
REBECCA ABBOTT is Professor of Communications at Quinnipiac University and an Emmy-award winning independent filmmaker. Abbott’s documentary subjects have included excellence in public education; the history of jazz music in New Haven; the impact of war on veterans and the role of arts in healing; the life of humanitarian Albert Schweitzer; and aeromedical rescue in the US Air Force. Ireland’s Great Hunger and The Irish Diaspora is her latest work. CHRISTINE KINEALY is the founding director of the Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. She is an authority on Irish history and is author of 20 books and numerous scholarly articles on Irish and Irish American history. In 2011 Kinealy was named “one of the most influential Irish Americans” by Irish America magazine, and “Woman of the Year” in 2014 by the Irish America Heritage and Culture Committee of the New York Department of Education. Her most recent works are “The Bad Times. An Drochshaol, A graphic novel,” written with illustrator John Walsh (Connecticut: Quinnipiac University Press, 2015).

Kurt C. Schlichting, Ph.D., "Manhattan's Irish Immigrant Neighborhoods: From the Famine to the Movie Classic - On the Waterfront"
2017-04-10 18:00
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, the families of the longshoremen lived in tenements and fought to survive.
1954, the classic American film, “On the Waterfront,” starring Marlin Brando, vividly portrayed the violence along the Manhattan waterfront and the stranglehold of corrupt union officials and the mob. The waterfront priest played by Karl Malden was a Jesuit, Father, Fr. Pete Corridan, who taught at the Labor Institute at Xavier parish on W.16th Street near the Hudson River docks. Corridan and other young Jesuits, the labor priests, came of age during the 1930s and 40s when the Catholic Workers movement, led by Dorothy Day, championed the rights of workers to form unions and collectively bargain for higher wages and better working conditions. Inspired by Day and the Papal labor Encyclicals, the labor priests saw their ministry as dedicated to social justice for the longshoremen. Fr. Corridan battled not just the unions and mobsters but also with Archdiocese of New York that saw the Church’s mission as saving souls, leaving social justice to the labor unions and the politicians.
KURT C. SCHLICHTING is the E. Gerald Corrigan ’63 Chair in Humanities & Social Sciences Department and a Professor of Sociology at Fairfield University (CT). He is the author of Grand Central Terminal: Railroads, Architecture and Engineering in New York (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2001), for which he received the 2002 Best Professional/Scholarly Book: Architecture & Urbanism Award from the Association of American Publishers. This book was the basis of “Grand Central,” an American Experience documentary on PBS, for which Dr. Schlichting served as an academic advisor and was an on-screen interviewee. His book, Grand Central’s Engineer: William J. Wilgus and the Planning of Modern Manhattan, was published by Johns Hopkins in the spring of 2012. Dr. Schlichting received his bachelor’s degree from Fairfield University and his master’s degree and a doctorate from New York University. We welcome Dr. Schlichting for this, his fourth talk, for the Museum of Newport Irish History.

Janet Nolan, Ph.D., "Weathering the Storm: A Fish Story of Ireland and Irish-America"
2017-09-27 18:00
“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, in the post-Famine era, seeks to answer this persistent question.
The Power brothers left their homeland in the early 1850s at the same time on different ships. Having promised to find and marry two sisters they met in Ireland, the brothers eventually arrived in Boston where they did indeed find and marry the sisters.
The Powers were not unskilled when they arrived in America. They were the heirs to a millennium-long tradition of deep-sea fishing in Ireland. Eventually settling in Gloucester, a premier fishing port on the North Atlantic coast, they plied their heritage in a new world.
This is the story of frontiersmen working in the wilderness of the open sea, and of the connection between Irish and Irish-American fishing traditions. The Irish did indeed catch fish during and after the Famine, as they long had done.
JANET NOLAN is professor emerita of history at Loyola University Chicago, where she taught Irish and Irish-American history for almost a quarter of a century after receiving her PhD in history from the University of Connecticut. She has also taught full-time at the Universities of Connecticut and Rhode Island. She is the author of two books: “Ourselves Alone: Women and Emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920” (1989) and “Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America” (2004), as well as numerous essays, articles, and reviews. She has given invited lectures in both the Republic and Northern Ireland, and throughout Europe and the United States. She has also appeared on television and radio in the United States, Ireland, and Northern Ireland. She now lives by the sea in Portsmouth. This is Professor Nolan’s second lecture for the Museum.

John F. Quinn, Ph.D., "The French Effect: How Rochambeau's Occupation Benefited the Irish in Newport"
2017-10-16 18:00
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 burned each year on Thames Street.
With the arrival of General Rochambeau and his officers and chaplains, attitudes towards Catholics started to shift. Newporter’s were charmed by the French and intrigued by their solemn liturgies. Many of the city’s residents were sorry to see the French leave for Virginia in 1781.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, new waves of nativism erupted in Boston and other New England cities in response to the growing number of Irish Catholic immigrants. Newport, which had a sizable Irish community centered around Fort Adams, did not experience the sort of conflict which was so commonplace elsewhere in New England. Surely, Rochambeau and his officers and priests helped set the groundwork for the acceptance of later generations of Irish Catholics in Newport.
JOHN F. QUINN received his Ph.D. in history from Notre Dame. He has been professor of history with Salve Regina University since 1992. A prolific writer, Dr. Quinn is the author of numerous articles, as well as the book Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth Century Ireland and Irish-America (U. of Mass. Press, 2002). His interests include Irish America, Modern Ireland, and American Religion and Ethnicity. He is an expert on Irish and Irish-American attitudes towards slavery in the 19th Century. Dr. Quinn’s professional memberships include: American Catholic Historical Association, American Conference on Irish Studies, Irish American Cultural Institute, and Society of Catholic Social Scientists. We are delighted to welcome Dr. Quinn back for his eighth speaking engagement with the Museum.

Ray McKenna, MA, "Providence's 'Little Ulster': Urban Industrial Life and the Famine Irish Generation"
2017-11-13 18:00
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 political reality of the State of Rhode Island. It would take the arrival of more “exotic” foreigners as well as Irish-American political and economic success to make the immigrants’ dreams for their children a reality. This talk will address Providence Irish immigrant housing, employment, family life, crime and more, and touch on the successes and joys as well as the setbacks and challenges faced by that generation.
RAYMOND J. MCKENNA received his BA in History from the University of Rhode Island and his MA in History from the University of Connecticut. His master’s thesis was on the history of immigration to America, and specifically on the Immigration Act of 1965. He taught European, Russian and American history for eleven years before going into the wine trade, full-time, in 1987. About ten years ago he returned to a project that he had worked on during his academic career: learning everything he could about the Famine Irish immigrant experience in Rhode Island, inspired by his fascination with the experiences of his ancestors. Six years ago, he “returned” to Truagh for the first time since his family left in the 1840s. Subsequently, he researches and gives talks about nineteen century Irish immigration to Rhode Island, the most recent being last March when he spoke at McCartan College in Emyvale, County Monaghan, on the migration from that small patch of land overlapping Tyrone, Monaghan, Armagh and Fermanagh.

Steve Marino, "The Newport Pre-Famine Irish Community in Transition: 1836-1846"
2018-03-20 18:00
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 evolved from a “fort” entity into an integral part of the city.
Please join us as we continue the conversation revealing the life and times of the pre-famine Irish in Newport.
STEVE MARINO taught history in Connecticut for 35 years and retired to Newport. He has been giving tours at Fort Adams since 2008. He is also on the Board of the Museum of Newport Irish History. He has degrees from Williams College, Brown University and the Hartford Seminary. This is Steve’s second presentation to our membership.

Kurt C. Schlichting, Ph.D., "The Irish in Newport - Building a Community: The St. Mary's Church 'Great Collection of 1881'"
2018-04-24 18:00
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 in the 19th and 20th centuries, an identity that continues today?
St. Mary’s Church anchored the Irish community. The magnificent church building, dedicated in 1852, and its school required the financial support of the parishioners, many of whom were recent immigrants, working class, and not wealthy. In 1881, the Pastor, Fr. Philip Grace D.D., organized the “Great Collection of 1881” and published a 27- page report listing parishioners by name and address, the amount pledged, and what they contributed.
Linking the “Great Collection” names and addresses to the 1880 Census data provides a fascinating view of the Newport Irish in the period after the Civil War. On what streets and in which houses did they live? What were their occupations and how generous were their contributions to the “Great Collection of 1881”? A $20 contribution may seem modest today, but if you worked as a laborer for $1 a day at the Fall River Line shipyard on Washington Street and earned $24 dollars a month, working 6 days a week, the contribution represented a month’s income.
KURT C. SCHLICHTING is the E. Gerald Corrigan ’63 Chair in Humanities & Social Sciences Department and a Professor of Sociology at Fairfield University (CT). He is the author of Grand Central Terminal: Railroads, Architecture and Engineering in New York (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2001), for which he received the 2002 Best Professional/Scholarly Book: Architecture & Urbanism Award from the Association of American Publishers. This book was the basis of “Grand Central,” an American Experience documentary on PBS, for which Dr. Schlichting served as an academic advisor and was an on-screen interviewee. His most recent book, Waterfront Manhattan: From Henry Hudson to the High Line, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in May 2018. Dr. Schlichting received his bachelor’s degree from Fairfield University and his master’s degree and a doctorate from New York University. We welcome Dr. Schlichting for this, his fifth talk, for the Museum of Newport Irish History.

Christine Kinealy, Ph.D., "Frederick Douglass and Ireland"
2018-09-26 18:00
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. Seven years earlier, Douglass had escaped from slavery, but the Fugitive Slave Act meant that he remained in danger of being captured and returned to his ‘master.’ His work as a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society and the success of his Narrative increased this risk and so he was persuaded to travel to Britain, where he would be safe. However, an Irish Quaker printer, Richard Webb, who was also an ardent abolitionist, offered to reprint the book, and thus provide Douglass with an income. So, two days after arriving in the transatlantic port of Liverpool, Douglass travelled to Dublin. He had intended to stay for four days, but remained in the country for four months, describing these four months as “the happiest times” in his life. Moreover, for the first time in his life, he felt truly free and like “a man, and not a color.”
This presentation will explore Douglas’s time in Ireland and his life-long fascination with the country and its people.
CHRISTINE KINEALY is the founding director of the Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. She is an authority on Irish history and is the author of 20 books and numerous scholarly articles on Irish and Irish American history. In 2011, Kinealy was named “one of the most influential Irish Americans” by Irish America magazine, and, in 2014, “Woman of the Year” by the Irish American Heritage and Culture Committee of the New York Department of Education. Her most recent work is Frederick Douglass and Ireland. In His Own Words (2 vols, Routledge, 2018). She is also curator of a year-long exhibition at Quinnipiac University entitled Frederick Douglass in Ireland: “The Black O’Connell.”

Tom Foley, M.A. Candidate, University of Rhode Island, "The Emmet Guards of Worcester, Mass."
2018-11-28 18:00
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 Emmet delivered one of the most memorable speeches of the 19th century, asking the world to leave his name and his tomb in obscurity until “my country takes her place among the nations of the earth. Then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.” Rather than vanish from history, Emmet became a potent symbol of egalitarianism and the struggle for Irish liberation, especially for Irish-Americans.
A generation after Emmet’s death, 56 Irish immigrants formed an independent militia company in Worcester which would become known as the Emmet Guards. Its officers swore an oath to defend Massachusetts, but the company had other unofficial purposes: to protect the rights of the Irish in Worcester and to facilitate, if possible, the restoration of Ireland to her rightful “place among the nations of the earth.” Though few if any of these original “Emmet’s” would ever return to Ireland to fight for independence, the company was a source of ethnic pride and solidarity for the next 5 generations of Worcester Irish. The Emmet Guards of Worcester would serve with distinction in the American Civil War, Spanish American War, and World War One.
This presentation will cover Robert Emmet and his legacy, the origin of the Emmet Guards, and the company’s service in France (1917-18), concluding with the post-war Irish independence movement in Worcester. It will also touch on other units with the same or similar moniker, such as the Emmet Guards of Providence, RI, and the Robert Emmet Guards of Newport, RI.
TOM FOLEY is a native of Westerly, RI, and is the great-grandson of Major General Thomas F. Foley, Captain of the Emmet Guards from 1912 – 1918. Tom received his B.A. in History from Providence College and is now a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island (M.A., History, projected 2021). This is a presentation of research collected in preparation for Tom’s master’s thesis.

Brendan O'Malley, Ph.D. Newbury College, "How the Irish Shaped Immigrant Politics in Nineteenth-Century New York"
2019-02-11 18:00
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 of the famine encountered especially difficult conditions. Decades of scholarship have documented the hardships of the famine migrants, including crushing poverty, hard labor for low pay, miserable tenements, rampant disease, family separation, nativist persecution, and even deportation. Less well understood is how the American Irish grew in a few decades from a marginalized group to one that wielded considerable power, taking control of urban political machines like New York City’s Tammany Hall by the late 1800s.
We will examine how the American Irish in New York began to consolidate power in one key arena: immigration politics. In 1847, during the famine migration crisis, the state legislature created a government agency devoted to protecting immigrant welfare, the Board of the Commissioners of Emigration. In 1855, this agency would open its Castle Garden Emigrant Depot, which would process eight million new arrivals over the next thirty-five years and serve as the nerve center of a small welfare state for immigrants. Irish New Yorkers played a key role in establishing the Emigration Board and overseeing its operation. This talk will demonstrate how the often-divided American Irish community in New York learned to come together and exert its rising political power to improve conditions for all immigrants arriving in the nation’s largest port of entry.
BRENDAN P. O’MALLEY is assistant professor of history at Newbury College in Brookline, Massachusetts. He earned a doctorate in history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2015 and currently is at work on a book entitled “Castle Garden: America’s First Immigrant Gateway.” His most recent essay, “Welcome to New York: Remembering Castle Garden, A Nineteenth-Century Immigrant Welfare State,” was published online by Lapham’s Quarterly in September 2018.

Dr. Lucy Salyer, author of "Under the Starry Flag: How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt and Sparked a Crisis over Citizenship"
2019-03-25 18:00
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 as British authorities arrested them for treason as soon as they landed, sparking an international conflict that dragged the United States and Britain to the brink of war. Under the Starry Flag (Harvard University Press, Oct. 2018) recounts this gripping legal saga, a prelude to today’s immigration battles.
The Fenians, as the freedom fighters were called, claimed American citizenship. British authorities disagreed, insisting that naturalized Irish Americans remained British subjects. Following in the wake of the Civil War, the Fenian crisis dramatized anew the idea of citizenship as an inalienable right, as natural as freedom of speech and religion. The captivating trial of these men illustrated the stakes of extending those rights to arrivals from far-flung lands. The case of the Fenians, Lucy E. Salyer shows, led to landmark treaties and laws acknowledging the right of exit. The U.S. Congress passed the Expatriation Act of 1868, which guarantees the right to renounce one’s citizenship, in the same month it granted citizenship to former American slaves.
Dr. Salyer will examine how the small ruckus created by these impassioned Irish Americans provoked a human rights revolution that is not, even now, fully realized. Placing Reconstruction-era debates over citizenship within a global context, Under the Starry Flag raises important questions about citizenship and immigration.
LUCY E. SALYER is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and author of Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law, which won the Theodore Saloutos Book Award for the best book on immigration history. A former Constance E. Smith Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Salyer received the Arthur K. Whitcomb Professorship for teaching excellence, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Cormac L.H. O'Malley, J.D., "Ernie O'Malley (1897-1957): Irish Patriot and Author: A Life Fighting the Pale"
2019-04-26 18:00
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 ranks of the IRA as a GHQ organizer who traveled around Ireland. Eventually, as Commandant-General, he was put in charge of three counties. Though he had reported to Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy, Ernie was strongly against the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which they supported. During the tragic civil war, he was appointed Assistant Chief of Staff under Liam Lynch. Ernie was captured, almost put on trial, which would have surely meant execution, but was saved due to his ill health and multiple wounds. Despite this, he went on a 41-day hunger strike while in prison. Ernie O’Malley was one of the last leaders released by the Irish Free State Army in July 1924.
Once out of jail and his health recovered, Ernie was sent to America to raise funds for the establishment of an independent newspaper in Ireland. After nine months of fundraising and lecturing, he dropped out to write in New Mexico about his military experiences. By 1935 he met his future wife, an American artist, Helen Hooker, applied for an Irish military pension, and returned to Ireland to get married. The rest of his life was spent trying to help give conservative Ireland the benefit of the international modernist spirit in terms of literature, poetry, artistic endeavors, and photography. When John Ford came to direct “The Quiet Man” in 1951 Ernie was consulted. Soon thereafter, his health deteriorated, and he died at age 59 in 1957, a man of many ambitions, but few realized in his lifetime.
CORMAC O’MALLEY is the son of Ernie O’Malley. He has been interested in Irish history since his college days. Since his retirement from an international corporate law practice, Cormac has worked to preserve his father’s literary and historical legacy by republishing his father’s earlier autobiographic works, On Another Man’s Wound and The Singing Flame and editing and publishing some newly discovered works. He has also published two volumes of his father’s letters and a multivolume series of his father’s military interviews with survivors of the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, entitled The Men Will Talk to Me: Ernie O’Malley Interviews. In 2015 he published Western Ways: Remembering Mayo through the Eyes of Helen Hooker and Ernie O’Malley.

Christopher Klein, "When the Irish Invaded Canada: The Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland's Freedom"
2019-09-26 18:00
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. The self-proclaimed Irish Republican Army invaded Canada not just once, but five times between 1866 and 1871 in what are known collectively as the Fenian Raids.
In When the Irish Invaded Canada: The Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland’s Freedom (Doubleday, March 2019), author Christopher Klein tells the outrageous story of a band of Irish rebels who fled the Great Hunger, fought for both the Union and Confederacy in the Civil War, and then united to undertake one of the most fantastical missions in military history. With the tacit support of the U.S. government and inspired by a previous generation of successful American revolutionaries, this motley group managed to seize a piece of America’s northern neighbor, if only for a matter of days, and constructed a transatlantic framework that would prove essential to the establishment of the Irish Republic decades later.
Klein’s illustrated lecture will include images from this little-known coda to the Civil War. Copies of his book will be available for signature and sale after the talk ($30, hardcover).
CHRISTOPHER KLEIN is the author of four books, including Strong Boy: The Life and Times of John L. Sullivan, America’s First Sports Hero, The Die-Hard Sports Fan’s Guide to Boston, and Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands. A frequent contributor to History.com, the web site of the History Channel, Christopher has also written for The Boston Globe, The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, Harvard Magazine, Smithsonian.com, and AmericanHeritage.com. He lives in Andover, Massachusetts. More at www.christopherklein.com.

Rev. Robert W. Hayman, Ph.D., "The Early and Mostly Forgotten History of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Ladies Auxiliary in Rhode Island From 1849 to 1920"
2019-10-21 18:00
Except for St. Patrick’s and Independence Day, this society has worked quietly to alleviate the physical needs and satisfy the emotional needs of its Irish members. While its works of charity have passed without notice, its internal disputes have attracted public attention. The fact that the Order has survived and, at times, flourished is a testament to both the spiritual qualities and financial success of many of its members.
ROBERT W. HAYMAN is pastor emeritus of St. Sebastian’s Parish, Providence and currently the historian of the Diocese of Providence and one of its archivists. He retired in June 2010 after thirty-six years of teaching at Providence College where he was Associate Professor of History and where he also received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in history. Fr. Hayman is the author of two books on the history of the Diocese of Providence and is currently working on a history of the Irish in Rhode Island from 1820 to 1920. We welcome Fr. Hayman for this talk, his fourth for the Museum of Newport Irish History.

Shai Afsai, Sean O'Callaghan, Ph.D., & John Quinn, Ph.D., "Ireland's Jewish Community and Newport's Irish Rabbi"
2019-11-04 18:00
Ireland’s small Jewish community dates to the late nineteenth century, when Jews sought to escape persecution in the Russian Empire. While most of the Jewish emigrants ended up in the United States, small numbers went to England and Ireland. In Ireland, groups of Lithuanian Jews settled in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Limerick. For the most part, the Jews were well treated by their neighbors, and many became quite proud of their Irish identity. Jews fought in the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1922-1923 Irish Civil War and Jews have served as Lord Mayors of both Dublin and Cork.
Theodore Lewis took a very different path. After studying theology at a prestigious Jewish institution in Poland, Lewis decided to leave Dublin and come to Newport to become rabbi of Touro Synagogue, a position he would hold for 36 years (1949-1985). During those years, Rabbi Lewis dramatically raised the profile of both the synagogue and Newport’s Jewish community. Lewis was well known for his learning and his sermons were published in two volumes.
SHAI AFSAI lives in Providence. His recent research has focused on the religious traditions of the Beta Yisrael Jewish community from Ethiopia, Judaism in Nigeria, aliyah* to Israel from R.I., Jewish pilgrimage to Ukraine, Benjamin Franklin’s influence on Judaism, and Jews and Irish literature. SEAN O’CALLAGHAN is an Associate Professor of Religious and Theological Studies at Salve Regina University, where he specializes in the teaching of world religions. He is also Graduate Director of the MA and PhD in Humanities. He has a particular interest in Judaism and attends Touro Synagogue frequently. JOHN F. QUINN is Professor of History at Salve Regina University, where he has taught since 1992. He specializes in Irish history and American ethnic and religious history. * The term “aliyah” refers to the immigration of Jews from the worldwide diaspora to Israel.

Steve Marino, "Here's the church, here's the steeple, open the door and see all the people: Newport's early Irish community and Rhode Island's first Catholic church."
2020-09-24 18:00
The 1820s were tough times for Newport. No longer was the harbor the international entrepôt that it had been during the colonial era. The mills along Thames Street were yet to be built and summer visitors were scarce. Yet, in 1828 Benedict Fenwick, Bishop of Boston, procured a lot of land with a schoolhouse on Barney Street in Newport, thus creating Rhode Island’s first Catholic Church. There is a great deal of mystery and controversy surrounding this schoolhouse/church but the church and the individuals that worshiped in it, would inevitably change the course of Newport History.
With the help of sacramental records, contemporary newspapers and genealogical sources, we will attempt to shed some light on the early history of the Newport Irish community.
STEVE MARINO taught history in Connecticut for 35 years and retired to Newport. He has been giving tours at Fort Adams since 2008. He is also on the Board of the Museum of Newport Irish History. Steve holds degrees from Williams College, Brown University and the Hartford Seminary. This is Steve’s third presentation to our membership.

Joseph Lennon, PhD, "Famine Memories: Terence MacSwiney's 1920 Hunger Strike"
2020-11-06 18:00
One hundred years ago, in 1920, daily newspapers around the world told the story of the starvation of a man. That man, Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, eventually died in England’s Brixton prison after a seventy-four day fast. The release of his corpse, his funeral, and a series of international commemorations held the attention of the world’s modern press — and fired the imagination of Irish writers and Irish emigrants around the world. This presentation will explore the international dynamics of fasting traditions, the hunger strike and its impact on politics.
The death of Terence MacSwiney on 25 October 1920 spurred an unprecedented level of public mourning in the Irish diaspora; as such, it remains a unique event in Irish and Irish-American history. Over a million people, in Ireland and around the world, gathered on streets, in churches, and in stadiums to mourn the famished body of this Republican mayor. The evocation of hunger and starvation at a time when Ireland was at war with the United Kingdom tapped into deep memories of Irish famine, particularly the catastrophic Famine of 1845-52 during which around one million people died and millions more emigrated. Following the outpouring of public grief, the United States and other nations began pressing London to resolve the dispute. The 1920 memorials thus signal a turning point in the Anglo-Irish War, illustrating the power of hunger on the Irish imagination.
JOSEPH LENNON, PhD, is the Emily C. Riley Director of the Center for Irish Studies, Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Professor of English at Villanova University. He writes on Irish literature and culture, his present research being on the pre-history of the hunger strike. His first book, Irish Orientalism, won the Donald Murphy Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies in 2004 and he has recently published scholarship in the Irish University Review and New Hibernia Review. He also publishes poetry in journals such as Poetry Ireland and Natural Bridge and has a book of poems, Fell Hunger, with Salmon Poetry, based in County Clare.

Erik J. Chaput, PhD, "Politics, Bigotry and Nativism: Rhode Island's Catholic Irish in the 1842 Dorr Rebellion"
2021-02-10 18:00
Dr. Erik J. Chaput will discuss the life of Thomas Wilson Dorr and the 1842 rebellion in Rhode Island that bears his name. In his talk, Dr. Chaput will devote particular attention to issues of gender, race and religion, especially the profound role anti-Catholic sentiment and anti-immigrant bigotry played in the spring and summer of 1842. Dr. Chaput’s talk will spotlight the social, labor and political environment in which Irish immigrants in Rhode Island lived and worked during this era. Dr. Chaput will also address the profound national ramifications of Dorr’s attempt at extra-legal reform.
(For background on the Dorr Rebellion, see the short documentary film on the Dorr Rebellion Project website, hosted by Providence College Library website: library.providence.edu/dorr )
ERIK J. CHAPUT received his doctorate in early American History from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Dr. Chaput is a frequent contributor to opinion and book review pages of the Providence Journal. He is the author of The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (University Press of Kansas, 2013). A native Rhode Islander and Providence College graduate, Professor Chaput teaches American history in the School of Continuing Education at PC and at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. Professor Chaput’s research has appeared in numerous publications, including Reviews in American History, Rhode Island History, Common-Place, American Nineteenth Century History, The New England Quarterly, Newport History, U.S. Catholic Historian, The Catholic Historical Review, Historical New Hampshire, and the Historical Journal of Massachusetts. He has edited a teaching document on Rhode Island and the Establishment Clause for secondary educators. He is the co-editor with Russell J. DeSimone of a digital edition of the letters of Thomas Wilson Dorr. The letters are available on the Dorr Rebellion Project Site hosted by Providence College.

Chuck Arning, Public Historian, " How Hard Would It Be to Dig a Ditch Anyhow? - How the Irish Saved The Blackstone Canal"
2021-03-16 18:00
Rhode Islanders were excited about building the Blackstone Canal and saw it as a major employment opportunity. After all, how hard could it be to dig a ditch? The increase in elevation from Providence to Worcester was 452 feet, and the topography of the Blackstone Valley required the canal to traverse marshes, wetlands, creeks and brooks along its path. Canal construction proved more difficult than originally thought and the over-eager Rhode Islanders in 1824 struggled to build it. The project was in dire straits, so a call went out to the battled-tested Erie Canal builders, who happened to be Irish.
We will examine just why the Irish came, as “navvies” and “strollers,” to build the early canals of America. We will focus on how the Irish saved the Blackstone Canal, an important economic engine that stretched from the exploding seaport of Providence, R.I. to the rural landscape of Central Mass., terminating in the Village of Worcester, and what happened after the Canal project was completed.
CHUCK ARNING retired from the National Park Service (NPS) after 24-1/2 years of service as an Interpretive Ranger in the Blackstone River Valley. He currently works as a consultant for the Worcester Historical Museum and assists other museums and historic sites in accomplishing their missions. As the A/V Specialist for the Blackstone Valley, he produced over 85 videos and TV episodes on the outdoor recreation, history, preservation efforts, and the people of the Blackstone River Valley. Arning produced, wrote, hosted and was a contributing editor of the award-winning series “Along the Blackstone” for the NPS. Ranger Arning was awarded the NPS’s 1997 National Freeman Tilden Award for excellence in interpretation. In 2002 he was awarded the Freedom Star Award for his work on the Underground Railroad by the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. He was awarded the 2014 Leadership in Preservation Award by the Blackstone Valley Chamber of Commerce, and the 2017 Massachusetts History Conference “Bay State Legacy Award.” Ranger Arning was project manager for the widely acclaimed book, Landscape of Industry: An Industrial History of the Blackstone Valley” (University Press of N.E., 2009). He is currently researching the Irish orphans and their emigration to Canada during the Famine, Black U.S. troops in WWI, and family history.

Janet Nolan, PhD, "When Harry Met Mary Ann: An Irish Family in an American City"
2021-04-21 18:00
In April 1888, teen-ager Mary Ann Donovan stood alone on the quays of Queenstown, outside the city of Cork, waiting to board a ship bound for Boston. Her parents had died a few months before, making Mary Ann and her older brother John the only members of the family remaining in Ireland. Older sister Nellie had already gone to America and lived in Lynn, Massachusetts, and Nellie’s weekly letters home were bright spots in the Donovan household. After their parents’ deaths, Nellie sent the passage money so that her sister could join her. The “S.S. Marathon” was to be her home as she crossed the water, one of thousands of other Irish farm girls seeking a better life in a new land.
Several years later, Mary Ann met Harry Nolan at an Ancient Order of Hibernians dance in West Lynn. Harry married the vivacious red-haired Mary Ann in 1897 and they went on to have nine children, the seventh of whom became my father. What unfolds is both a micro and a macro history of one Irish-American family, the Donovan-Nolans, and one New England industrial city, Lynn, Massachusetts. It is also a representative story of a far larger tale than one family in one city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That tale, the story of Irish emigrants to America and the steep slope they climbed into the American middle class, is one that is echoed in millions of IrishAmerican families throughout the United States. We will look at Harry and Mary Ann, in particular, to see what they have to tell us about themselves and about the larger Irish experience in America.
JANET NOLAN is professor emerita of history at Loyola University Chicago where she taught Irish and Irish-American history to both graduates and undergraduates for almost a quarter of a century. She is internationally known as a pioneering scholar of the role of women in Irish emigration history. Two of her books, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920 (1989) and Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America (2004), remain in print and are considered fundamental to the growing understanding of women in the transatlantic history of the Irish. She has given talks on this subject throughout the U.S. and Europe, including Ireland and Northern Ireland, and has appeared on American and Irish television and radio programs. After her retirement, she spent a blissful decade in Portsmouth. Last September, she moved to the north shore of Boston, the land of her family’s American roots. This is her third talk for the Museum of Newport Irish History.
