Plentiful Country

The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York

De: Tyler Anbinder

Narrado por: David McCusker

From the award-winning author of Five Points and City of Dreams, a breathtaking new history of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Great Potato Famine, showing how their strivings in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America.
In 1845, a fungus began to destroy Ireland’s potato crop, triggering a famine that would kill one million Irish men, women, and children—and drive over one million more to flee for America. Ten years later, the United States had been transformed by this stupendous migration, nowhere more than New York: by 1855, roughly a third of all adults living in Manhattan were immigrants who had escaped the hunger in Ireland. These so-called “Famine Irish” were the forebears of four U.S. presidents (including Joe Biden) yet when they arrived in America they were consigned to the lowest-paying jobs and subjected to discrimination and ridicule by their new countrymen. Even today, the popular perception of these immigrants is one of destitution and despair. But when we let the Famine Irish narrate their own stories, they paint a far different picture.

In this magisterial work of storytelling and scholarship, acclaimed historian Tyler Anbinder presents for the first time the Famine generation’s individual and collective tales of struggle, perseverance, and triumph. Drawing on newly available records and a ten-year research initiative, Anbinder reclaims the narratives of the refugees who settled in New York City and helped reshape the entire nation. Plentiful Country is a tour de force—a book that rescues the Famine immigrants from the margins of history and restores them to their rightful place at the center of the American story.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Anbinder details the human horrors of the potato famine in unadorned prose that only adds to its emotional impact… [and] weaves together individual immigrants’ stories with more general history to make this a remarkably perceptive and engaging portrait of American immigration history.”—Booklist

“[An] eye-opening account… Readers will be engrossed.”—Publishers Weekly

"Plentiful Country is a masterpiece of research and writing. Tyler Anbinder has outdone himself by weaving the lives of individual immigrants into a sweeping history of the Irish in New York. From their struggles in Ireland before the famine to the crammed-full ships that carried them over, from their lives as servants, laborers, and artisans to their fanatical savings, ingenious enterprises, and movements across the United States, this book vividly captures the rich history of a complex people."—T.J. Stiles, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The First Tycoon and Custer's Trials

“On a recent visit to Ireland, I saw one of the docks where, it was said, desperate, starving women once held up their children, beseeching strangers to take them to a new life in America. In Tyler Anbinder’s moving, expertly told narrative, I learned what happened to that generation of immigrants and their descendants. This is a hugely important and too little-known part of the American story.”—Adam Hochschild, New York Times bestselling author of Spain in Our Hearts and American Midnight

“Plentiful Country celebrates the survivors of Ireland's Great Famine, who are so often cast as dazed immigrants unprepared and unsuited for life in New York and America. Drawing on a decade of research, Tyler Anbinder presents them instead as women and men with agency: adept learners who, by both seizing and creating opportunities for themselves, remade their new country. They speak for themselves in this book, in word and deed.”—Hasia Diner, New York University, and author of Erin’s Daughters in America

Well researched.

Contained information that I was unaware of. Not the standard downtrodden immigrants or notorious tales of Irish New York. I highly recommend allowing this authors book.

Limited in its point of view

I think this book will appeal most to people who for whatever reason still hold onto the stereotype of the Irish as being lazy and incapable of bettering their economic circumstances. The entire book is one story after another of people who immigrated to NYC from Ireland, what occupation they went into, how that went over time, and where they ended up economically. The conclusion of the book, after referencing Obama, is that 'anyone can make it in america if they're healthy and work hard.' My concern is that someone could read this book and apply it wholesale to all modern immigrant groups, as well as American Blacks. I think the book would be greatly improved if it were noted that this is the story of *one* group that immigrated to NYC at a particular time in history. At the time of their arrival, there was still a great deal of prejudice against Catholics; however, this was the waning days of the virility of that prejudice as attitudes about religion changed rapidly in the latter half of the 19th century and, especially after immigrants from southern and eastern europe began arriving in large numbers in the early 20th century, prejudice against the Irish eased, and then, following the horrors of WWII, was mostly erased as the concept of 'whiteness' was broadened and enlarged to include most european groups, thus doing away with the racial hierarchy of europeans that had helped fuel the hatreds of Nazism. They also arrived at a time in US history when the frontier seemed limitless, the midwest was soon given away to anyone who would try to farm it, and industrial growth was in its infancy. But the story of each immigrant group is different--the circumstances that lead them to leave their country of origin and seek a new beginning in America, the education and skills they bring with them, and the opportunities and social networks they find available to them in the place where they locate--and yes the amount of discrimination they face in their host country that might limit those opportunities or make them harder to achieve. To say that the story of the Irish who came to NYC during the potato famine proves that 'anyone can make it in america' assumes that no group could have a harder time than they did, and that assumption is based on the abject poverty and starvation they were facing in Ireland under oppressive British rule and on the attitudes towards Catholics that prevailed at that time--that these two items together mean that the Irish of the 1840s in NYC overcame everything that any group would need to overcome in seeking a new life in America. I think these are false assumptions, and whatever lessons are gleaned from the experience of Irish immigrants in the 1840s, they don't necessarily apply to any other immigrant group. Each group must be studied on its own terms--its own unique history, circumstances of arrival in the US, and what obstacles and opportunities they face at the time of their arrival.

On the positive side, I really liked the first chapter which covered the famine in Ireland, the British response to that, and the ensuing consequences--very interesting and informative.

This book could have been 50 Pages long

Well researched but I felt that I could have gotten all the contented needed in a couple of chapters rather than an entire book. Would have been a great long form magazine article or research paper.

Changing Perceptions on Immigrants

I have never read a book quite like this. The author brings to life the Irish famine immigrants of New York through bank records. It sounds impossibly boring, but it was fascinating and very well organized. And the stories bring about an important shift of the perception of the "poor and destitute." I am amazed at how hard most worked and how much they saved. I wish we had a record of all the immigrant groups so we could see how important they are to our country.

Interesting and informative. Recommend.

This book contains a great detail of detail about the Irish Potato Famine and the circumstances of the people who lived through it, in a way that many history books do not share. Anbinder is able to not only tell the larger story of the famine and politics in the region, but also paint a picture of the lives of Irish farmers down to the details of their huts, He follows a number of these immigrants through their emigration to the United States and tells personal stories which show just how much perseverance and drive those Irish immigrants to the U.S. had. Much research went in to this book, and Anbinder is a fantastic writer as well. I learned a lot.
I also enjoyed the narrarator -- pleasant voice, and good reading. Highly recommend this book if you are interested in these topics.