Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
Categories
Politics & government

PLENTIFUL COUNTRY

Tyler Anbinder

The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York

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.

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. 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.

Available products
Book Published 2024-03-12 by Little Brown

Comments

Anbinder details the human horrors of the potato famine in unadorned prose that only adds to its emotional impact [...]. Anbinder weaves together individual immigrants' stories with more general history to make this a remarkably perceptive and engaging portrait of American immigration history.

What New York's First Migrant Crisis Can Teach Us About Immigration Today by Tyler Anbinder Read more...

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.

...Anbinder details the human horrors of the potato famine in unadorned prose that only adds to its emotional impact... Anbinder weaves together individual immigrants' stories with more general history to make this a remarkably perceptive and engaging portrait of American immigration history.

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.

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.

...eye-opening account... This is a master class in turning a large, data-rich archive into a fluid narrative. Readers will be engrossed.

How a surprising detail in bank records helped a historian bust a longstanding myth about Irish immigrants Read more...