How the Irish Became White

by Ignatiev,Noel

• ISBN13: 9780415963091
• ISBN10: 0415963095
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-09-11
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country - a land of opportunity - they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person's skin. Noel Ignatiev's 1995 book - the first published work of one of America's leading and most controversial historians - tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White .

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Routledge Classics Edition

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Something in the Air

White Negroes and Smoked Irish

The Transubstantiation of an Irish Revolutionary

They Swung their Picks

The Tumultuous Republic

From Protestant Ascendancy to White Republic

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