Irish America
Irish America
When William of Albany, as he came to be known, left County Cavan in 1789 in search of the American dream, he could never fathom that his grandsons would become America's foremost novelist and philosopher respectively. But aside from Henry and William James, this extraordinary clan had in its midst an equal and perhaps a tad superior (as claimed by a majority of Jamesian … [Read more...] about Remembering Alice James
In 1867, the two young Cashman sisters sailed from Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, to America and took the newly completed transcontinental railroad to San Francisco. With the shortage of women on the frontier, these two beautiful Irish girls were expected to be the center of masculine attention, and that marriage and family would soon follow. One of the sisters soon fell in … [Read more...] about Angel of the Camps
Hard to believe that it's already a year since the days of Morrison Madness, when tens of thousands of Irish (as well as people of other nationalities) mailed over 14 million applications for the chance of winning 40,000 green cards in a Green Card lottery. The lottery, aimed largely at redressing the shortcomings of previous U.S. immigration regulations, was a major victory … [Read more...] about Morrison Visas: Round Two
A novel by Edna O'Brien One warm summer evening last year, I picked up a first edition of The Country Girl from the bookshelf in a house where I was staying and I did not leave my place by the window until I had read it from start to finish. To read the story of Kate and Baba after 30 years was like drinking clear spring water from the wells that abound in Miss O'Brien's … [Read more...] about Time and Tide
History has largely forgotten Patrick Ronayne Cleburne. Perhaps this is not surprising. Like many Irishmen throughout history, he fought on the losing side of a foreign war and, as we know, history is written by the victors. However, since Americans are presently given to Civil War retrospectives, it is fitting that we remember one of the Confederacy's greatest military … [Read more...] about Patrick Ronayne Cleburne: The Stonewall Jackson of the West
