ABSTRACT
While Irish emigrants to America in the eighteenth century had been mainly Protestant, the emigrants of the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly Catholic. By the 1830s, Catholics exceeded Protestants in the transatlandc migration from Ireland for the first time since 1700. As mass emigration from Catholic Ireland got underway in the pre-famine era (1800–44), Irish Americans of Protestant descent loudly proclaimed their difference from the newcomers, calling themselves Scotch-Irish rather than Irish and assimilating rapidly into the mainstream of Protestant America. Irish-American history thereafter has a two-fold interest. It is the story, firstly, of the ongoing formation of ethnic identity among the predominantly Catholic Irish immigrants in the United States; but this story can be told only in terms of the repeated intersection of the Irish presence with the principal themes in American history, especially regarding urban life, labour, race, religion and politics.
