This dissertation examines Irish immigrants and their family members in antebellum New Orleans. Historians often depict Irish immigrant families as disintegrating in the face of abject poverty, prejudice, and rampant epidemics and as victims of a cruel fate which they seem unable to escape. However, my work demonstrates that Irish immigrant families behaved in a pro-active manner: they appropriated aspects of American society, and used them for their benefit as they established cohesive communities with their own value systems. Furthermore, they did not seek validation for this system by mainstream America. The morally binding customs of the Irish came from a variety of sources, such as the Catholic Church, the transplanted customs of the old country, and the experience of the famine immigration which gave them a common basis of understanding of shared survival strategies This dissertation is based on extensive analyses of several comprehensive databases consisting of passenger lists, census records, marriage records as well as Catholic asylum records. Altogether, these databases contain over half a million entries. This study describes the coping mechanisms and familial as well as economic strategies utilized to confront a harsh new environment. Intrinsic to this investigation is a thorough consideration of the changing functions of the Irish immigrant family in New Orleans, and how these changes affected the stability of the family unit. Indeed, the Irish displayed a remarkable degree of innovation as they settled into a new urban environment. Rather than a lack of enterprise, the data reveals repeated examples of it. The Irish appropriated space that enabled them to maintain the family, build a community, and garner some measure of control over their lives. Thus, the massive relocation of this ethnic group to avoid near certain destruction was not a haphazard event. Nor was their re-settlement in New Orleans. Both undertakings were the result of Irish initiative or, put differently, Erin's Enterprise / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_27151 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Contributors | Kelley, Laura D (Author), Latner, Richard (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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