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PLENTIFUL COUNTRY: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York
PLENTIFUL COUNTRY: THE GREAT POTATO FAMINE AND THE MAKING OF IRISH NEW YORK by award-winning author Tyler Anbinder, a breathtaking new history of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Great Potato Famine, showing how their strivings in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America. Hachette/Little Brown will publish in March 2024.
In 1845, a fungus began to destroy Ireland’s potato crop, triggering a famine that would kill one million Irish men, women, and children—and drive over one million more to flee for America. Ten years later, the United States had been transformed by this stupendous migration, nowhere more than New York. By 1855, roughly a third of all adults living in Manhattan were immigrants who had escaped the hunger in Ireland. These so-called “Famine Irish” were the forebears of four U.S. presidents (including Joe Biden) yet when they arrived in America they were consigned to the lowest-paying jobs and subjected to discrimination and ridicule by their new countrymen. Even today, the popular perception of these immigrants is one of destitution and despair. But when we let the Famine Irish narrate their own stories, they paint a far different picture.
In this magisterial work of storytelling and scholarship, acclaimed historian Tyler Anbinder presents for the first time the Famine generation’s individual and collective tales of struggle, perseverance, and triumph. Drawing on newly available records and an astonishing ten-year research initiative, Anbinder reclaims the narratives of the refugees who settled in New York City and helped reshape the entire nation. Plentiful Country is a tour de force—a book that rescues the Famine immigrants from the margins of history and restores them to their rightful place at the center of the American story.
Praise for PLENTIFUL COUNTRY
“Plentiful Country is a masterpiece of research and writing. Tyler Anbinder has outdone himself by weaving the lives of individual immigrants into a sweeping history of the Irish in New York. From their struggles in Ireland before the famine to the crammed-full ships that carried them over, from their lives as servants, laborers, and artisans to their fanatical savings, ingenious enterprises, and movements across the United States, this book vividly captures the rich history of a complex people.” —T.J. Stiles, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The First Tycoon and Custer’s Trials
“Plentiful Country celebrates the survivors of Ireland’s Great Famine, who are so often cast as dazed immigrants unprepared and unsuited for life in New York and America. Drawing on a decade of research, Tyler Anbinder presents them instead as women and men with agency: adept learners who, by both seizing and creating opportunities for themselves, remade their new country. They speak for themselves in this book, in word and deed.” —Hasia Diner, Professor Emerita, New York University
Tyler Anbinder is a retired professor of history and former chair of the History Department at George Washington University, and author of three award-winning books of historical nonfiction: Nativism and Slavery, winner of the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians; Five Points, winner of the New York City Book Prize of 2001; and City of Dreams, winner of the Mark Lynton Prize for History. He also served as a consultant to Martin Scorsese for the Academy Award-nominated film Gangs of New York.
“On a recent visit to Ireland, I saw one of the docks where, it was said, desperate, starving women once held up their children, beseeching strangers to take them to a new life in America. In Tyler Anbinder’s moving, expertly told narrative, I learned what happened to that generation of immigrants and their descendants. This is a hugely important and too little-known part of the American story.”―Adam Hochschild, New York Times bestselling author of Spain in Our Hearts and American Midnight
I'm delighted to share a wonderful Publishers Weekly review for PLENTIFUL COUNTRY:
“In this eye-opening account, Anbinder (City of Dreams), a historian at George Washington University, draws on records housed in the New York Public Library’s archives of the former Emigrant Savings Bank in Manhattan to document the lives of NYC’s “famine Irish.” Utilizing these banking records to track individual bank patrons over their lifetimes, he shows that even though these immigrants—who fled the famine that followed the Irish potato blight of 1845—began their American lives in poverty and struggle, many were able to prosper. Most started out in New York as unskilled laborers or domestics, though some were skilled craftsmen. The next step was usually to become a peddler, selling such cheaply attained items as apples, corks, and charcoal. Successful sellers rose to become clerks, civil servants, or business owners. A few even made it to the professional class of doctors and lawyers. Following these workers as they climbed this social ladder, Anbinder points out that they were hardworking, frugal, and managed to build up savings and avoid wasteful spending, even as most native-born Americans believed they were “lazy,” “indolent,” and “utterly lacking in ambition”—an attitude which Anbinder argues is wrongly still the dominant historiographic perspective on the famine Irish. This is a master class in turning a large, data-rich archive into a fluid narrative. Readers will be engrossed. (Mar.)”
PLENTIFUL COUNTRY has received another wonderful review, this one from Booklist:
A historian of U.S. immigration, Anbinder (Five Points, 2010) tackles the history and impact of
Irish immigration to New York City in the mid-nineteenth century. Centuries of plunder by English
aristocracy turned the Emerald Isle into an impoverished nation even before the potato famine
turned life deadly. Anbinder details the human horrors of the potato famine in unadorned prose
that only adds to its emotional impact. Escaping Ireland, both middle-class and destitute people
boarded crowded ships for the dreadful month-long crossing to new life in New York. There, they
generally soon prospered, despite initial prejudices against them. Drawing from savings bank
records, Anbinder traces individuals’ rise (and fall) as day laborers, peddlers, artisans, clerks,
business owners, and professionals. Many who started in Manhattan's tenement-filled Lower
East Side moved away to populate Midwestern farms and cities, and the succeeding generation
became great contributors to American political, industrial, and cultural landscapes. Anbinder
weaves together individual immigrants’ stories with more general history to make this a
remarkably perceptive and engaging portrait of American immigration history.
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