Irish America
Irish American Republicanism
Drawing on my research for Blood Runs Green I have extended the parameters of my study of Irish American Republicanism and am now looking at the period from the American Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century.
I’m particularly interested in:
Irish and Irish American soldiers in both the Union and Confederate armies.
Fenian plans (and attempts) to invade Canada
Splits within the Irish American organisations
The rise and fall of Clan na Gael.
Irish Chicago
Irish Journalists in the United States
My research focuses particularly on the career of Margaret Buchanan. Described by the owner of the Chicago Herald as ‘the best living writer of English’, Sullivan who was one of the foremost journalists of her generation. From the 1870s until her death in 1803 her articles appeared in newspapers across the United States. She covered an astonishing variety of subjects including politics, finance, editorials, art, education, poetry and architecture. Sullivan regularly promoted the rights of women, African Americans and tenant farmers.
Double Agency: The Secret Lives of Henri le Caron
For those with talent, imagination and a taste for adventure the United States has always been alluring, and never more so than in the late-nineteenth century, with its frantic pace of change and boundless opportunities for self-invention. Double Agency travels from the cafes of Paris to the battlegrounds of Tennessee during the America Civil War, on to the American Mid-West and over the Canadian border before ending in a witness box in the Royal Courts of Justice in London to tell the story of one man who adapted seamlessly to every role he played.
The story of Henri Le Caron is a story of deception, international espionage, betrayal, patriotism and murder. An Englishman masquerading as a Frenchman, he pledged his loyalty to an Irish republic while continuing to serve the British Crown. He plotted invasions of Canada and helped launch a 'Dynamite War' on Britain, all while diligently reporting his activities to his handler in London.
Representations of the Irish in 19th Century America
In the pages of Puck, Harper’s Weekly, National Police Gazette Judge & America among others there are numerous examples of negative stereotypes of the Irish.
My current project examines the illustrations Thomas Nast drew for for America in the late 1880s.
Related Publications
Blood Runs Green: The Murder that Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago (Chicago, 2015)
”Readiness and Range”: Margaret Sullivan, Irish Nationalist, American Journalist’ in Reddin van Tuyll, O’Brien, Broersma (eds), Politics, Culture and the Irish Diaspora Press in America, (Syracuse 2020)
‘Methodology and Martyrs: Irish American Republicanism in the late-nineteenth century’ in Peter Herman (ed.) Critical Concepts: Terrorism, (Cambridge, 2018)
‘Patriotism, Professionalism and the Press: The Chicago Press & Irish Journalists, 1875-1900’ in Kevin Rafter (ed.), Irish Journalism: A Historical Anthology (Manchester, 2011), 120-34
‘How the English Spy who sought to destroy Parnell tore Irish America Apart’, Irish Times, 11 May 2015,