ABSTRACT
By the 1940s, Britain had replaced the United States as the major destination for Irish emigration. Although substantial numbers of Irish people came to the United States in the 1950s and again in the 1980s, they made up only a small percentage of total Irish emigration and a tiny percentage of American immigration in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1970s and 1990s, moreover, emigration dwindled in the face of unprecedented economic prosperity in Ireland. In the postwar era, therefore, the history of the American Irish was a history concerned not with immigrants so much as with established members of the ethnic group, from the second generation and beyond. It was these well-established, American-born Irish who set the tone for the history of the American Irish as a whole in this period, continuing to dominate the American Catholic Church, playing a prominent role in local and federal politics, and once again making a substantial contribution to the nationalist struggle in Ireland.
