Erik J. Chaput, PhD, "Politics, Bigotry and Nativism: Rhode Island's Catholic Irish in the 1842 Dorr Rebellion"
2021-02-10 18:00 UTC
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.
