At Columbia University (where, incidentally, I became friends with Rob) I took two 19th-century American history undergraduate courses that featured dramatic lectures on Irish emigrants, the group that served as a prototype for subsequent immigrants from other nations. The books I have listed here gave me a deeper, more complicated view of the experiences of people like my Irish Catholic ancestors on both sides of my family. I find today’s harangues on social media and cable news woefully deficient in helping to understand forces like nativism, the influence of religion on public figures, and the harrowing adjustments to American life by emerging ethnic and racial groups.
I wrote
An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O'Dwyer
As a child and youth, O’Dwyer witnessed the depredations committed during the Irish War of Independence by British troops and their much-feared and resisted recruits, the Black and Tans. In this extensively researched biography, journalist-historian Coogan traces how the former accountant Michael Collins, as director of intelligence for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), astonished British governments used to crushing prior Irish rebellions.
After signing a controversial treaty creating the Irish Free State (with concessions opposed by the O’Dwyer family), Collins fell victim to an assassin’s bullet. I finished this biography filled with questions about Collins’ death and what might have happened to the formally partitioned nation had he survived.
I grew up with stereotypes about Tammany Hall as a nest of New York political corruption. Golway offers a knowledgeable corrective that shows how the urban machine garnered votes from new immigrant groups and maintained its power by pioneering then-radical social reforms such as child labor laws, workers’ compensation for those maimed on the job, and a minimum wage.
He traces the organization’s decline to changing New York City demographics and a lost ability to respond to the emerging challenges and changes of the post-WWII era—trends that left it vulnerable to a group of college-educated young Democratic Party reformers, both men and women, that Paul O’Dwyer allied with in the late Fifties and Sixties.
History casts Tammany Hall as shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft and patronage personified by notoriously crooked characters. In his groundbreaking work Machine Made, journalist and historian Terry Golway dismantles these stereotypes, focusing on the many benefits of machine politics for marginalized immigrants. As thousands sought refuge from Ireland's potato famine, the very question of who would be included under the protection of American democracy was at stake. Tammany's transactional politics were at the heart of crucial social reforms-such as child labor laws, workers' compensation, and minimum wages- and Golway demonstrates that American political history cannot be understood…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
As executive director of the New York chapter of the progressive National Lawyers Guild, O’Dwyer was on the front lines in fighting the Red Scare, a reactionary movement that found its most visible protagonist in Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
I found Nye’s account of the red herrings, fear-mongering, and scapegoating that gave rise to the term “McCarthyism” dismayingly familiar in today’s political ecosystem of castigation and misinformation. (McCarthy’s youthful chief counsel on the committee dedicated to rooting out Communists and their fellow travelers from the government, Roy Cohn, would serve decades later as the henchman-like lawyer for the litigious real estate titan Donald Trump.)
In the long history of American demagogues from Huey Long to Donald Trump, never has one man caused so much damage in such a short time as Senator Joseph McCarthy. We still use 'McCarthyism' to stand for outrageous charges of guilt by association, a weapon of polarising slander. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy destroyed many careers and even entire lives, whipping the nation into a frenzy of paranoia, accusation, loyalty oaths, and terror. When the public finally turned on him, he came crashing down, dying of alcoholism in 1957. Only now, through bestselling author Larry Tye's exclusive look at the…
From a former speechwriter for New York governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo–and current historical detective novelist and essayist that I have long admired—this wise and witty memoir summons up a lost world: an Irish Catholic Bronx enclave of the 1950s and 1960s before economic and social change transformed the borough.
Quinn’s prose style is lively and gripping, as befits the primary drafter of then Gov. Mario Cuomo’s famous speech at the Democratic National Convention of 1984 assailing “Reaganomics.”
In his inimitable prose, master storyteller Peter Quinn chronicles his odyssey from the Irish Catholic precincts of the Bronx to the arena of big-league politics and corporate hardball.
Cross Bronx is Peter Quinn's one-of-a-kind account of his adventures as ad man, archivist, teacher, Wall Street messenger, court officer, political speechwriter, corporate scribe, and award-winning novelist. Like Pete Hamill, Quinn is a New Yorker through and through. His evolution from a childhood in a now-vanished Bronx, to his exploits in the halls of Albany and swish corporate offices, to then walking away from it all, is evocative and entertaining and enlightening…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
For the longest time, I have wanted to better comprehend the winding and complex years-long road to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the multi-party accord, which, with the US government serving as an international peace broker, ended decades of sectarian and state violence at the end of Paul O’Dwyer’s life.
This lucid and objective scholarly account helped me grasp how O’Dwyer and a cadre of fellow grassroots organizers managed in 1992 to elicit a public vow from Bill Clinton to appoint a US envoy to Northern Ireland, with Clinton making good on the promise during his presidency.
This book examines the role of the United States of America in the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process. It begins by looking at how US figures engaged with Northern Ireland, as well as the wider issue of Irish partition, in the years before the outbreak of what became known as the 'Troubles'. From there, it considers early interventions on the part of Congressional figures such as Senator Edward Kennedy and the Congressional hearings on Northern Ireland that took place in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, 1972. The author then analyses the causes and consequences of the State Department decision…
Our book considers the life and times of Paul O’Dwyer, an emigrant from a rural hamlet in the west of Ireland who made an indelible mark in law, politics, and many 20th-century progressive movements. While his eldest brother, Bill, accommodated Tammany Hall as he climbed the ladder to Mayor of New York City just after WWII, Paul would not compromise his left-wing beliefs and often confronted established leaders in both major political parties as well as the Catholic Church in New York City.
Nevertheless, as our book shows, Paul periodically reached across the partisan divide to ideological opponents, particularly his quest for peace and justice in the British-occupied north of Ireland during the long period of intense violence known as the Troubles.
