Convention has it that Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century
confined themselves mainly to industrial cities of the East and
Midwest. The truth is that Irish Catholics went everywhere in
America and often had as much of a presence in the West as in the
East. In "Beyond the American Pale," David M. Emmons examines this
multifaceted experience of westering Irish and, in doing so, offers
a fresh and discerning account of America's westward expansion.
""Irish in the West"" is not a historical contradiction, but it
is -- and was -- a historical problem. Irish Catholics were not
supposed to be in the West--that was where Protestant Americans
went to reinvent themselves. For many of the same reasons that the
spread of southern slavery was thought to profane the West, a
Catholic presence there was thought to contradict it -- to
contradict America's Protestant individualism and freedom. The
Catholic Irish were condemned as the clannish, backward remnants of
an old cultural world that Americans self-consciously sought to
leave behind. The sons and daughters of Erin were not assimilated,
and because they were not assimilable, they should be kept beyond
the American pale.
As Emmons amply demonstrates, however, western reality was far
more complicated. Irish Catholicism may have outraged
Protestant-inspired American republicanism, but Irish Catholics
were a necessary component of America's equally Protestant-inspired
foray into industrial capitalism. They were also necessary to the
successive conquests of the "frontier," wherever it might be found.
It was the Irish who helped build the railroads, dig the hard
rocks, man the army posts, and do the other arduous, dangerous, and
unattractive toiling required by an industrializing society.
With vigor and panache, Emmons describes how the West was not so
much won as continually contested and reshaped. He probes the
self-fulfilling mythology of the American West, along with the far
different mythology of the Irish pioneers. The product of three
decades of research and thought, "Beyond the American Pale" is a
masterful yet accessible recasting of American history, the
culminating work of a singular thinker willing to take a wholly new
perspective on the past.
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