Fifteen Eighty Four

During the visit of President Joe Biden to Ireland in April 2023 there was discussion in the Irish press about the relative strength of the Irish American relationship. The influence of the USA in Ireland remains evident however and Irish society continues to consume American popular culture. Ireland in the 21^st century is increasingly multicultural, and the Irish identity is more broadly defined than ever before. At the same time white supremacy remains a significant threat internationally and especially in the USA. The ‘white slave’ narrative, focused on Irish indentured servants in the 17^th century, continues to gain traction despite efforts by historians to provide evidence-based rebuttals. In this context it is especially important to provide nuanced histories of the Irish experience and the interactions of Irish people with American ideas and culture, that acknowledge the complexity of racial identity.

This book, America in Ireland, is part of an expanding historiography of Ireland that takes a global or transnational approach and moves beyond the nation-state as the primary category of analysis. Through eight thematic essays by leading scholars of Irish culture and history, the volume explores the influence of America in Ireland through the prisms of material culture, marketing, religion, politics, literature, cinema, music, and folklore. The essays demonstrate some of the myriad ways in which Irish and American society and culture have intermingled and provide a new perspective on post-Famine Ireland. America in Ireland reveals an Ireland battling with competing forces of tradition and modernity, and in constant interaction with Anglicising and Americanising impulses. While each contributor acknowledges the diverse range of influences on Irish society, including Anglicisation, they uncover the varied ways in which American ideas permeated Irish society through the spread of ideas, the arrival of American parcels in Ireland and other material culture, and the influence of returned migrants.

This book is a companion to the historian David Fitzpatrick’s final monograph, The Americanisation of Ireland: Migration and Settlement 1841-1925 (2019). Fitzpatrick felt that the backwash of the Irish diaspora had been somewhat neglected by scholars focused on settlement abroad, and he became interested in the influence of the presence of return migrants in even remote parts of rural Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He believed that a collection of interdisciplinary essays would be the best means of testing the extent to which the diaspora generated forms of Americanisation that might be less tangible. In January 2019 Fitzpatrick invited interdisciplinary experts to come together to examine diverse aspects of the impact of Americanisation on Irish culture and society in the decades between the Great Famine and the early years of the Irish Free State. The project was begun during his own terminal illness and so Fitzpatrick asked me (as one of his former graduate students) to bring the project to fruition. This volume is not intended as a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the relationship between Ireland and the United States but rather as a snapshot of how Fitzpatrick’s approach might be usefully applied for developing a cultural and social history of the Americanisation of Ireland.

 The book concludes with an Afterword by the historian Roy Foster who traces the legacies of Fitzpatrick’s works from his pioneering study Politics and Irish Life to his highly original scholarship on Irish emigration, culminating in his research on the Americanisation of Ireland. Fitzpatrick was one of the leading historians of modern Ireland and of Irish emigration. His pamphlet, Irish Emigration 1801-1921 (1984), remains a key text in undergraduate curricula and regularly cited today. His magisterial study of the letters of Irish emigrants to Australia, Oceans of Consolation, offered not only unparalleled insight into emigrant experiences but also a new methodology for the analysis of personal testimonies. The Americanisation of Ireland, published posthumously after his premature death in 2019, has been described as a major new interpretation of Irish migration history. Fitzpatrick continues to be deeply missed by all those who knew and learned from him but, as this volume makes clear, his legacy as an historian and educator endures. The contributors and I hope that this book will spur further debate and encourage others to rethink the relationship between Ireland and America, and the modernisation of Ireland.