Irish Potato Famine: How Starving Immigrants Built Modern America

In 1845, Ireland was home to 8.5 million people. Within a decade, that number collapsed in a way that has almost no parallel in modern Western history. Not through war. Not through plague. Through hunger, and a catastrophic failure of government that allowed food to leave a starving island while a million people died. What the Irish did next changed the United States of America forever. This is the full story of the Great Irish Famine, from the first smell of the blight in the fields of Cork to the coffin ships crossing the Atlantic to the tenements of Boston and New York where a people with nothing built something extraordinary from the only resource they had, which was each other. It is a story about survival. About what human beings do when everything is taken from them. About the parishes built from pennies, the political machines built from solidarity, the police forces and labor movements and savings accounts that carried a starving people from the absolute bottom of American society to its highest office in four generations. 111 years from a barrel maker's grave in East Boston to the steps of the United States Capitol. This video covers everything, including the British government's ideological response to the famine and the food exports that continued throughout it, the coffin ships and their staggering mortality rates, the Five Points and the systematic discrimination the Irish faced in American cities, the Know-Nothing Party's rise to power in Massachusetts, the extraordinary gift from the Choctaw Nation in 1847, the Emigrant Savings Bank records that rewrote everything America thought it knew about famine immigrant social mobility, and the Kennedy family arc from Patrick Kennedy's arrival in 1848 to JFK's inauguration in 1961. If you have Irish blood, this is your story. If you don't, it is one of the most extraordinary human stories in modern history. Either way, it deserves to be known in full. CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 4:15 The World Before It Broke 8:45 Black '47 15:43 The Boats 19:23 America Wasn't Waiting 31:18 How They Refused to Disappear 43:47 Three Generations 57:37 This Is Who Your People Are SOURCES AND FURTHER READING Anbinder, Tyler. Plentiful Country: The Great Famine Irish Who Made New York City. Little, Brown and Company, 2023. The definitive account of famine immigrant social mobility, based on 150 years of untouched Emigrant Savings Bank records. Kinealy, Christine. This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845 to 52. Gill and Macmillan, 1994. The most comprehensive scholarly account of the famine and the British government's response. Ó Gráda, Cormac. Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory. Princeton University Press, 1999. Essential reading on the economic and demographic dimensions of the famine. Golway, Terry. Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics. Liveright, 2014. The definitive account of Irish political power in New York. Goodwin, Doris Kearns. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Simon and Schuster, 1987. The most detailed account of the Kennedy family arc from famine immigration to the White House. Hamalainen, Pekka, and Benjamin Madley. The Choctaw Nation and the Trail of Tears. For context on the Choctaw gift of 1847 and its historical significance. Trevelyan, Charles. The Irish Crisis. Longmans, 1848. The British government's own account of its famine relief policy, written by the man who oversaw it. Read it and draw your own conclusions. MUSIC Heartbreaking by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-... Artist: http://incompetech.com/