Ireland's Great Famine in Irish-American History Enshrining a Fateful Memory

Mary Kelly tells the crucial, fascinating story of how and why the Irish in the United States first experienced, later 'forgot,' and in recent decades 'recovered' in memory the horror of the Great Famine of 1845-52-the tragic, foundational event of Irish-American history. -- Kerby A. Miller, University of Missouri Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, Mary Kelly's Ireland's Great Famine in Irish-American History is not just a recounting of historical events-in this case of Irish mass starvation and emigration. It is rather a subtle and compelling study of the powerful and culturally determinative influence of how those events were remembered and the legacy of that remembrance. The immigrant generation brought stories of the Great Hunger with them to America; successive generations recalled, retold and commemorated those stories, and shaped their ethnic identities around them. It is the case that the Irish went through a brief, self-inflicted bout of forgetfulness, only, and just recently, to be "restored to memory" and to Famine remembrance. Kelly's very fine book is a brilliant evocation of that process of remembering and forgetting and of the collective "Irish post-traumatic (and post-colonial) stress disorder" that initiated and propelled it. -- David M. Emmons, University of Montana Kelly shows how a necessary suppression of the shocking impetus for post-1840s Irish emigration facilitated the transition from hated Papists to acceptable white ethnic grouping. She deploys disparate sources to suggest how this holocaust throbs silently under the loud St. Patrick's Day celebrations that appear to denote ethnic success. Kelly is a diviner able to track underground memory currents and to uncover testimony in the lacunae. She marries the instincts of a novelist with the rigor of the historian, a rare ability that will make Ireland's Great Famine in Irish-American History a work of enduring importance to scholars and general readers from a wide spectrum of disciplines and interests. -- Mary Burke, University of Connecticut Mary Kelly's Ireland's Great Famine in Irish-American History is a groundbreaking work of investigative scholarship. As well as offer important insights into the continuing evolution of the Irish-American identity, Kelly chronicles the human struggle to make sense of a past that, though painful to possess, is impossible to escape. In terms of ethnic history in general and Irish-American history in particular, this book is a milestone. -- Peter Quinn, Author of Banished Children of Eve