In his new book, Tyler Anbinder (author of Five Points and City of Dreams) dramatically challenges the standard narrative about the Irish who escaped the Great Potato Famine and settled in the United States. Drawing on new data and ten years of research, the award-winning historian shows that the immigrants who made New York their home in the 1840s and ‘50s were able to make huge strides in America, despite formidable odds.
 

The fungus which destroyed Ireland’s essential food crop in 1845 left roughly a million dead, and sent 1.3 million to America. The nation was utterly transformed by this migration, but nowhere more than New York. By 1855, roughly a third of the adults living in Manhattan were so-called “Famine Irish.” Consigned to low-paying work and subjected to discrimination, until now the popular belief has been that most of these refugees continued to struggle and remained in poverty. Anbinder paints a far different picture. Showcasing individual and collective tales of perseverance and triumph, Plentiful Country flips the story on its head, demonstrating that most of these immigrants achieved remarkable upward mobility; not just the lower middle-class emigrants who could afford to flee, but hundreds of thousands impoverished by the catastrophe. So often cast as “dazed immigrants unprepared and unsuited for life in New York and America,” Anbinder presents them instead, Hasia Diner writes, “as women and men with agency: adept learners who, by both seizing and creating opportunities for themselves, remade their new country.”

Kurt Schlichting, emeritus professor of sociology and anthropology and the author of Waterfront Manhattan, joins in conversation.