How the Irish Became Protestant in America

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Carroll

AbstractIt often comes as a surprise to learn that most contemporary Americans who think of themselves as “Irish” are, in fact, Protestant, not Catholic. While commentators generally agree that these Protestant Irish-Americans are descended mainly from the Irish who settled in the United States prior to the Famine, the story of how they became the Protestants they are is—this article argues—more complicated than first appears. To understand that story, however, one must correct for two historiographical biases. The first has to do with the presumed religiosity of the so-called “Scotch-Irish” in the pre-Famine period; the second involves taking “being Irish” into account in the post-Famine period only with dealing with Catholics, not Protestants. Once these biases are corrected, however, it becomes possible to develop an argument that simultaneously does two things: it provides a new perspective on the contribution made by the Irish (generally) to the rise of the Methodists and Baptists in the early nineteenth century, and it helps us to understand why so many American Protestants continue to retain an Irish identity despite the fact that their link to Ireland is now almost two centuries in the past.

Author(s):  
Bruce Nelson

This chapter examines Irish nationalism in the context of the debate over slavery and abolition. It focuses on the figure of Daniel O'Connell. O'Connell was by reputation Ireland's liberator; he certainly was the most authoritative and charismatic voice of the emerging Irish Catholic nation of the early and mid-nineteenth century. He was also an outspoken opponent of slavery—in fact, one of the most powerful antislavery voices in all of Europe. Seeing the White Republic, and Irish Americans, through O'Connell's eyes requires us to explore the complex circumstances that confronted Irish immigrants in the United States and to understand why they would not—and to some degree could not—embrace his antislavery views. What is perhaps most remarkable about O'Connell, though, is not his success or failure in this regard but his attempt to construct an Irish identity that required opposition to slavery and other forms of oppression as one of its essential components.


2008 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin A. Fitz

A new order for the New World was unfolding in the early nineteenth century, or so many in the United States believed. Between 1808 and 1825, all of Portuguese America and nearly all of Spanish America broke away from Europe, casting off Old World monarchs and inaugurating home-grown governments instead. People throughout the United States looked on with excitement, as the new order seemed at once to vindicate their own revolution as well as offer new possibilities for future progress. Free from obsolete European alliances, they hoped, the entire hemisphere could now rally together around republican government and commercial reciprocity. Statesmen and politicians were no exception, as men from Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay tried to exclude European influence from the hemisphere while securing new markets for American manufactures and agricultural surplus.


Perceptions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Julius Nathan Fortaleza Klinger

The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of whether or not early nineteenth-century lawmakers saw the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a true solution to the question of slavery in the United States, or if it was simply a stopgap solution. The information used to conduct this research paper comes in the form of a collation of primary and secondary sources. My findings indicate that the debate over Missouri's statehood was in fact about slavery in the US, and that the underlying causes of the Civil War were already quite prevalent four whole decades before the conflict broke out.


Author(s):  
Lindsey Flewelling

This chapter surveys the immigration and identity formation of the Scotch-Irish in America during the nineteenth century. Two ethnic organizations, the Scotch-Irish Society of America and the Loyal Orange Institution of the United States, are analysed as windows to Scotch-Irish ties back to Ireland the involvement in the unionist cause. The chapter explores the ways in which the Scotch-Irish responded to Irish-American calls for Home Rule and independence, attempted to support the unionists, and remained connected to Ireland. The Scotch-Irish were influenced by and remained interested in conditions in Ireland. In addition, the Ulster Scots themselves were affected by the actions and legacy of the Scotch-Irish. They used Scotch-Irish ethnic heritage to help form their own “Ulsterman” identity, which was in turn utilized to unify the unionist movement.


Author(s):  
Maris A. Vinovskis

This article provides a brief history of K–12 education testing in the United States from colonial America to the present. In early America, students were examined orally. After the mid-nineteenth century, written tests replaced oral presentations. In the late nineteenth century, graded schools gradually replaced the single-teacher, one-room schools. In the beginning of the twentieth century, standardized intelligence tests were increasingly used to categorize and promote students. State departments of education have played a larger role in local school funding and policies in the past hundred years. Since the 1960s, the federal government has expanded its involvement in national education while also promoting the role of states. During the past three decades, the federal government and states increased the use of high-stakes national testing with initiatives such as America 2000, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and Every Student Succeeds.


2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jérôme Bourdieu ◽  
Joseph P. Ferrie ◽  
Lionel Kesztenbaum

Although rates of intergenerational mobility are the same in the United States and Europe today, attitudes toward redistribution, which should reflect those rates—at least in part—differ substantially. An examination of the differences in mobility between the United States and France since the middle of the nineteenth century, based on data for both countries that permit a comparison between the socioeconomic status of fathers and that of sons throughout a period of thirty years, demonstrates that the United States was a considerably more mobile economy in the past, though such differences are far from apparent today.


Slavic Review ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-349
Author(s):  
Priscilla R. Roosevelt

In “Baryshnia-krestianka” Aleksandr Pushkin introduces us to Grigorii Ivanovich Muromskii, a “nastoiashchii russkii barin” reduced to living on his one remaining estate, who squanders his remaining wealth creating an “Angliiskii sad.” The gardening revolution of eighteenth century England, inspired by the overgrown ruins of Rome and Naples and by a new feeling for untrammeled nature, set in motion a vogue for informal, picturesque landscaping that swept across Europe, altered garden design in the United States, and reached Russia in the reign of Catherine as the harbinger of a later, more pervasive aristocratic Anglomania. As Muromskii's landscaping proclivities suggest, by the early nineteenth century the English or “irregular” garden had become a universal form for the Russian country estate, its basic motifs carried out on whatever scale an estate owner could afford.


2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kate M. Kocyba

In the nineteenth century the Episcopalians used Gothic Revival architecture for dogmatic purposes to define their status among Protestant denominations and secure their place in the United States of America. The discussion of neo-Gothic churches in America usually begins after the arrival of the English theological Oxford Movement in the 1830s. I claim the political changes that occurred with the American Revolution along with early nineteenth century American tensions between low and high church Episcopalians fostered a distinct American Episcopalian neo-Gothic church development. Through exchanges of ideas between English and American clergy and architects, American Episcopal High Church architecture developed and spread throughout the United States. By examining specific churches, including those by Frank Wills and Richard Upjohn, in context of Anglican and Episcopalian doctrine, its liturgical practices, and publications by architects and English and American ecclesiological societies, I show how and why neo-Gothic churches became solidified as a signifier of and reinforced the Episcopal faith.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document