AMERICA SAID THE IRISH WEREN'T WHITE... THEN MADE THEM ITS SYMBOL

Your family calls itself Irish. A century and a half ago that word cost people jobs, housing and sometimes their lives. This is the story of how the Irish went from being treated as a separate breed to becoming one of the defining faces of American identity. It covers what the word white actually meant in nineteenth century America, why Catholic immigration terrified a Protestant republic, the Philadelphia riots of eighteen forty four that burned two churches in the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed, the ape like cartoons printed for decades in the most respected magazines in the country, and the ugly truth about what happened in New York in July of eighteen sixty three. It also covers the No Irish Need Apply argument that historians are still fighting over, and one correction almost nobody makes about whether the Irish were ever legally denied white status at all. Then the reversal. The jobs nobody else wanted became the American archetype. The parish holiday became a national party. The candidate accused of digging a tunnel to the Vatican lost in a landslide, and thirty two years later another Irish Catholic won. Today more than thirty million Americans call themselves Irish, several times the population of Ireland itself, and when they visit they are told they are American. If your surname came off a ship into Boston or New York, tell me in the comments where your line came in and what your family still says about it.