Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York

In this eye-opening account, Anbinder (City of Dreams), a historian at George Washington University, draws on records housed in the New York Public Library’s archives of the former Emigrant Savings Bank in Manhattan to document the lives of NYC’s “famine Irish.” Utilizing these banking records to track individual bank patrons over their lifetimes, he shows that even though these immigrants—who fled the famine that followed the Irish potato blight of 1845—began their American lives in poverty and struggle, many were able to prosper. Most started out in New York as unskilled laborers or domestics, though some were skilled craftsmen. The next step was usually to become a peddler, selling such cheaply attained items as apples, corks, and charcoal. Successful sellers rose to become clerks, civil servants, or business owners. A few even made it to the professional class of doctors and lawyers. Following these workers as they climbed this social ladder, Anbinder points out that they were hardworking, frugal, and managed to build up savings and avoid wasteful spending, even as most native-born Americans believed they were “lazy,” “indolent,” and “utterly lacking in ambition”—an attitude which Anbinder argues is wrongly still the dominant historiographic perspective on the famine Irish. This is a master class in turning a large, data-rich archive into a fluid narrative. Readers will be engrossed. (Mar.)