Navigating Historical Crosscurrents in the Irish Atlantic: Essays for Catherine B. Shannon

This volume takes inspiration from Professor Catherine Shannon’s scholarship on Modern Irish and Irish American history and her advocacy for peace in Northern Ireland and features original research by distinguished scholars and social-justice activists on both sides of the Atlantic. The essays illuminate the historical relationship between Ireland and North America over past centuries. They offer new readings of the transatlantic crosscurrents that shape our understanding of Irish emigration and North American settlement, and constructions of ethnic Irish identities. This collection brings together respected Irish, British, American, and Canadian historians, literary scholars, and social-justice activists to address the following thematic approaches to the Irish and Irish American historical experience: Famine impact and legacy; Boston Irish political culture; Irish Revolution-era nationalist activism; Northern Ireland conflict. Considered from a range of historical, literary, political, and cultural perspectives, the essays collected here examine crucial forces connecting the ancestral home and the adopted homeland over centuries of Irish migration and North American settlement. They revise traditional depictions of ethnic Irishness in explorations of the Famine’s consequence, ethnic Irish prominence in Boston, the 1916-era watershed, and Northern Ireland’s troubled political and cultural landscape–lenses that expose crucial historical navigations across the Irish Atlantic. These new readings of the evolution of the ethnic identity collectively generate a major contribution to modern Irish and Irish American historical scholarship.