TV legend Norman Lear had heard it before.
"That face screams Irish!”
Lear was on the set of a new TV sitcom he was writing and producing, about a working-class family in Queens, New York.
The star of the show – with the working title "All in the Family" – was a New York City-born Irish American actor named John Carroll O'Connor, who played a narrow-minded union guy … [Read more...] about Archie’s Irish “Family” –
50 Years Later
Feature
Archie’s Irish “Family” –
Clinton’s Irish
TRIUMPH
On November 30, 1995, US President Bill Clinton made a historic visit to Northern Ireland.
By Brian Rohan
No American president could have dreamed it better: a clear, crisp night after seven days of rain: 100,000 Catholics and Protestants gathered outside Belfast City Hall, not for an angry protest but rather a peaceful celebration; warm-up act by Belfast's native … [Read more...] about Clinton’s Irish
TRIUMPH
New England’s Irish “Witch”
By Mike Tubridy
January / February 1994
Goody Ann Glover was hanged as a witch on November 16, 1688. Could it have been that it was because she was a Catholic whose first language was Irish? Had one not known the dour Puritans of this New England town better, one might have thought they were celebrating a holiday but, in fact, they had come out to witness the hanging of a witch. From jail to the gallows they … [Read more...] about New England’s Irish “Witch”
Presidents & First Ladies of Irish Ancestry
By Carl Sferrazza Anthony
There's as much of the old sod in the White House as there is on its south lawn. The backgrounds of America's First Families are diverse: Nancy Reagan and Lady Bird Johnson have Spanish forebears; Herbert Hoover was Swiss and Canadian; Mamie Eisenhower was part Swedish while Ike was German; Martin Van Buren and the Roosevelts were Dutch; James Garfield had a royal strain … [Read more...] about Presidents & First Ladies of Irish Ancestry
Yankee Doodle with a Brogue:
The Irish in the American Revolution
By Thomas Fleming
May / June 1998
In Virginia's Shenandoah Valley there is a gravestone that reads:
Here lies the remains of John Lewis, who slew the Irish lord, settled in Augusta County, located the town of Staunton and furnished five sons to fight the battles of the American Revolution.
Those words are an apt summary of the Irish role in the Revolution. They responded en masse to the call for resistance to … [Read more...] about Yankee Doodle with a Brogue:
The Irish in the American Revolution