irish (Other Keyword)
1-8 (8 Records)
During the 1850s, the Blue Ridge Mountain Railroad Company recruited 2,000 Irish immigrants to work an area 20 miles west of Charlottesville, Virginia, carving out tunnels and cuts for an emerging rail line. The grueling and dangerous work transformed the physical landscape and turned a transient immigrant population into a vibrant semi-settled community. This paper explores the identities of the two groups of Irish laborers involved with the construction of the Blue Ridge Railroad Tunnel, the...
Domestic Labor in Black and Green: Deciphering the Shared experiences of African American and Irish Domestics Working in the same Northern Virginia Households and Communities (2015)
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries wealthy American households relied on domestic labor for the running of the home. In the Northeast, this labor was provided by European immigrants, who often moved from job to job seeking better opportunities. While in the South, African Americans continued to perform the same work many had performed under slavery, often staying in the same geographical region as their family and former owners. In Northern Virginia, these two forms of domestic labor...
Examining Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century New York City through Patent Medicines (2016)
Patent medicines were immensely popular in the 19th century. They promised astounding cures, were unregulated and relatively inexpensive, and permitted individuals to self-medicate without an interfering physician. Archaeologists have often begun their interpretations of these curious commodities with the premises that they were lesser quality alternatives to physicians’ prescriptions and thus more appealing to poorer alienated groups (who used them passively as advertised) than to the...
Excavating The ‘Green Redcoat’:Historical Archaeology And New Approaches To The Irish Military Tradition And Experience In The British Army, 1815-1919 (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology on the Island of Ireland: New Perspectives" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the early 1980s, Peter Karsten referred to Irish soldiers in British military service as the ‘Green Redcoat’; a powerful phrase that has been used by many to identify this large group ever since. (Karsten, 1983-4: 34-6) In Irish and British military historiography, the concept of national identity has long...
A False Sense Of Status?: The Ceramic And Glass Wares Of Lower Working Class Irish In The City Of Detroit During Rapid Industrialization (2018)
The immigrant population increased in the City of Detroit between 1840 and 1860 due to rapid industrialization. The Erie Canal and rail-road expansion made Detroit more accessible to the world and was the primary conduit for the influx. The timber and mining industry provided a wide range of employment opportunities. The Irish were the largest group of immigrants. Most of the Irish lived in the Corktown neighborhood. A tenement row-house in the Corktown neighborhood, the Workers Row House...
Getting to Know Your Neighbours: Critically Thinking Through an 19th Cenutry Irish Family in Ontario (2018)
In exploring ethnicities in North America, groups are often contrasted against a homogenized patterning that can often be read as the white Euro-Canadian colonizer. While this framing is effective for demonstrating while specific groups may differ from the predominant pattern, it also risks creating a ‘straw-dog’ argument that artificially creates a homogenized pattern where non exist. This paper shows that the white Euro-Canadian colonizer can be explored to demonstrate nuanced ethnic...
Irish Independence in the Crapper? Irish Republican Army Buttons in San Francisco (2017)
This paper examines two Irish Rublician Army buttons discovered in a privy associated with a late 19th century household in San Francisco in order to elucidate how Irish immigrants became Irish Americans on the West Coast. Archaeologits and historians have studied the Irish Diaspora, this they have largely focused on the Northeast. While the Irish Republican Army is familiar to contemporary audiences, many people are unaware of the organization’s 19th century roots in the United States. The...
"Irishness" and Tea Consumption: The Materiality of Ethnicity (2018)
Excavations at the McHugh Site (47WP294), a mid-to-late Nineteenth Century homestead in Wisconsin, resulted in the recovery of a large material culture assemblage. Historical documents reveal the site’s occupants to have been pre-famine Irish emigrants who settled in Ohio before moving to Wisconsin in 1850. However, analyses of the material culture have thus far failed to uncover evidence of an Irish identity distinct from an American identity. This paper presents results of an analysis of the...