THE IRISH EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA

Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928. By Timothy J. Meagher. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. ix + 533 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $22.00.

Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945–1995. By Linda Dowling Almeida. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. x + 212 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

Eileen McMahon
Lewis University

In their books, Inventing Irish America and Irish Immigrants in New York, Timothy Meagher and Linda Dowling Almeida have provided an interesting and dynamic view of the historical and generational challenges that Irish immigrants and their children faced. Meagher examines the experiences of the Worcester, Massachusetts Irish from the Famine generation through the American born of the 1920s, while Dowling Almeida's primary focus is on the post-World War II New York Irish, including the experiences of Irish illegals. What emerges from these two studies is a more complex understanding of the Irish experience in America.