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

by Tyler Anbinder Narrated by David McCusker

Overview

From the award-winning author of Five Points and City of Dreams, 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.
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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 a*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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

[A] brilliant book… Drawing on new archival sources, Anbinder gives voice to a generation’s struggle to escape from destitution and despair and its remarkable success in achieving dignity and stability."—Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times

“Surprising and contrarian… A miracle of historical precision.”—National Review

“Impressive… substantive… illuminating… Anbinder offers a vivid array of immigrant portraits, mostly (though not entirely) set in New York. More broadly, he issues a challenge to historians who ‘suggest that the Irish had hardly any control over their destinies.’”—Commonweal

“Groundbreaking and revelatory . . . this is revisionist history in the best sense of the word.”—Irish Business Post

“A superb revisionist history of the Famine generation… Anbinder...provide[s] a series of riveting and deeply personal stories of men and women who moved up the socioeconomic ladder through hard work, entrepreneurial vision and a wee bit of luck.”—The Wall Street Journal

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

“[An] eye-opening account… Readers will be engrossed.”—Publishers Weekly

"With meticulous genealogical research, Anbinder fleshes out the lives of labourers and domestics, peddlers, barmen and saloon-keepers, making for an absorbing read."—Irish Independent

"Research that should reshape history on both sides of the Atlantic...it is hard to overestimate the importance and achievement of Anbinder's work."—Irish Times

"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."—T.J. Stiles, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The First Tycoon and Custer's Trials

“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.”—Adam Hochschild, New York Times bestselling author of Spain in Our Hearts and American Midnight

“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.”—Hasia Diner, New York University, and author of Erin’s Daughters in America

"Groundbreaking. The survivors of the Great Hunger portrayed as never before. Plentiful Country will transform your understanding of the generation who survived. They emerge from the shadows in a story of determination and hope that forged New York as we know it."—Fin Dwyer, author of A Lethal Legacy

Kirkus Reviews

2023-12-15
A scholarly history of 19th-century Irish immigration to New York City, and from there to points far inland.

Anbinder writes that while Irish immigrants to New York in the years around the Potato Famine were not as poor as they’ve been portrayed, only “four in ten managed to improve their standing in the socio-economic hierarchy over the course of their lifetimes.” While 40% may not be the most sparkling record, the author later qualifies his remarks with the perhaps self-evident observation that those who landed with useful trades did better on the whole than those who became street sweepers and junk sellers. It wasn’t all beer and skittles, then, but it wasn’t all Five Points and cholera-ridden tenements, either. Anbinder notes that about three-quarters of the 1.3 million Irish to arrive in the U.S. during and immediately after the Potato Famine landed in New York—but most of them pushed on, and some of the most interesting episodes in this rather formless narrative center on immigrants who made their way to California. Anbinder is good at reading the statistics, working with both digital tools and a vast archive of documentary materials. Using those resources, he ferrets out such things as the gradual Irish dominance of the New York police force, fueled by the fact that apart from giving authority to the previously disempowered, “police work paid better than unskilled work and almost every kind of artisanal labor.” Another lucrative line of work was owning a saloon, and both the police and the alcohol connections have explanatory powers in the New York of today. For all the statistics and social-historical insights, though, the book could have used more vigorous storytelling along the lines of Sean Connolly’s On Every Tide.

Sometimes arid, but with insights into the growth and evolution of Irish America.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159627780
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	03/12/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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