Making difference: conflict over Irish identity in the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade

The controversy surrounding the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade suggests that Irish ethnicity in the United States is still an important site of identity formation and fragmentation. In this paper I examine the New York City parades between 1990 and 2001 where a conflict has developed between the organizers of the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, who want a place in the parade but have been denied entrance. The identity politics that surround the St. Patrick’s Day parade controversy suggest that for diasporic communities, ethnic and national identities are highly contested and that boundaries—some hard and fast, others more permeable—are constructed along any number of axes. For the construction of Irish identity in New York City within-group identity is disputed across a number of these axes with the most important difference being sexual identity, particularly when it is being performed in a public space.     

Standardizing the home?: Women reformers and domestic service in New Deal New York

In response to the poor working conditions suffered by domestics struggling to survive the Depression, middle-class women's organizations initiated various legislative reforms aimed at tackling the problems they believed plagued the occupation. Throughout these years, organized women debated three key pieces of reform related to domestic service: efforts to suppress street-corner markets, health requirements for prospective domestics, and state-level wage and hour reform. These reforms were united by the rhetoric of privacy, which clubwomen used both to oppose wage and hour reform and to support requirements that domestics have physicals before applying for work. This article examines the fine distinction that middle-class women's organizations drew between public and private in the appropriate application of government power and the resulting conflict between progressive women's gender ideology and their most deeply-held reform ideals. In doing so, it reveals organized women's struggle to reconcile their humane ideals with the reality in their kitchens.     

Remembering and Forgetting Sites of Terrorism in New York, 1900–2001

Abstract

This article assesses the manner in which terrorist attacks have been remembered and forgotten within New York during the twentieth century. As a 'global city', New York has frequently been the focus of individuals and groups seeking to promote their cause by attacking targets in the city, its businesses, its infrastructure, its organizations, and its citizens. By examining how these events were reported and subsequently incorporated or dismissed within both the urban fabric and the city's 'collective memory', this article addresses how violent terrorism is engaged with by society. Building upon the advances made within the study of modern conflict archaeology, this article examines the possibility of an archaeology of terrorism.     

Even ‘Wilder Workhouse Girls’: The Problem of Institutionalisation among Irish Immigrants to New Zealand 1874

Studies of the Irish in New Zealand tend to focus predominantly on sectarian issues and respective ‘identities’. While class is explored to a lesser extent, it is mainly through the lens of occupational status. Overall, migrant poverty and criminality in that colonial setting has received the least attention from historians, because the socio-economic profile of the majority of Irish immigrants was generally of a higher status. This article traces a group of poor assisted immigrants that departed Cork at very short notice in 1874 and examines how some of them achieved notoriety in New Zealand. Using a combination of poor law records, shipping records, newspapers, government reports and criminal statistics, this article traces the fortunes of the single Irish workhouse girls. Irish Poor Law registers can be notoriously tricky to negotiate and present many problems for historians. Periodically Poor Law Guardians invested in assisted immigration schemes and to that end they surrendered groups of migrants. In so doing, the guardians bound individuals by a range of similarities—marital status, social class, fiscal means, age, abilities and gender to mention but a few—and such groups lend themselves to case-study analysis. As prophesised by those who argued against its foundation, the poor law network in Ireland both created and exacerbated many social problems. In many respects, when over-crowding occurred, it offered little by way of training and thus created a stasis for poverty. Building on recent case studies of ‘wild workhouse girls’ undertaken by Anna Clark on the South Dublin Union and Virginia Crossman on a Wexford Union, this research explores the concept of ‘modulation’ used by Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin in the context of migration, whereby migrants were at the mercy of the host community to decide whether they can be accepted or rejected.1 Clark, ‘Wild Workhouse Girls’; Crossman, ‘The New Ross Workhouse Riot 1887’; Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 62–68. This article traces and links the ‘institutionalised’ behavioural patterns of these poor, unskilled, single, young women with indefinite periods of ‘modulation’ in a negotiated space between rejection, vice, incarceration and an existence on the ‘outside’.     

Reframing the “Irish Question”: the role of the Irish co-operative movement in the formation of Irish nationalism, 1900–22

This article examines the role of the Irish co-operative movement in the early twentieth century and argues that it played a crucial role in shaping a popular understanding of the “Irish Question”. This mass-membership movement impacted upon the development of the Irish state and population. By taking this rural, social movement as a lens to analyse Irish society in the early twentieth century, social and economic issues re-emerge as central components to a contemporary understanding of Ireland's increasingly contested position within the Union. As the expectation of some kind of political resolution to demands for political independence grew during the First World War, radical nationalism absorbed a social and economic discourse that originated within the co-operative movement in its critique of the British state as it operated in Ireland. Irish co-operation represented a sophisticated form of political economy that provided an influential ideological platform for Irish nationalists as they anticipated some form of political independence.     

The Manhattan Yankees? Planning Objectives,City Policy,and Sports Stadium Location in New York City

The owners of the New York Yankees professional baseball team have claimed that they are dissatisfied with the location of the team's current ballpark in the economically depressed South Bronx. To appease them, Mayor Giuliani proposed constructing a new stadium for the Yankees in Manhattan, prompting a city-wide debate over whether the team should stay in the Bronx or move to Manhattan. This article outlines the two competing proposals and evaluates their claims. The Manhattan site is linked to the image creation of New York's downtown while the Bronx site sees the stadium as part of a broader regeneration scheme for a deprived part of the city. This article discourages a blind acceptance of Manhattan-centric planning, and presents the argument that the Bronx site is in the best interests of New York.