3/8: Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York Hardcover – March 12, 2024 by Tyler Anbinder (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 26 April 2024
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Plentiful-Country-Potato-Famine-Making/dp/031656480X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
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.
1880 NYC Oyster stand
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island? |
| 0:04.0 | Jane Gaskin did exactly that, trading in the family home to begin a new life in the |
| 0:09.1 | tropics. |
| 0:10.1 | But she soon discovers that Paradise has its secrets. |
| 0:13.4 | I'm Alice Levine, and this is the price of Paradise, |
| 0:18.0 | the island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption, and murder. Wish you were here. Follow the price of Paradise Now wherever |
| 0:26.7 | you listen to podcasts. This is a CBSI on the world. I'm John Bachelor sitting with Professor Tyler |
| 0:39.5 | Ann Binder. The book is plentiful country, the, The Great Potato Famine, and the Making of Irish New York. |
| 0:46.0 | The Irish, the famine Irish have taken the great risk of an ocean voyage to reach to America, rather than stay in Ireland where they might starve to death. |
| 0:57.0 | They are from all parts of Ireland and they're coming to an unknown land. |
| 1:01.0 | Professor, the trip itself was a test of one's not just endurance and patience, given that |
| 1:09.5 | you were packed together in steerage or on the deck of a very small ship. But at the same time, there were, you |
| 1:16.7 | were pray, suddenly pray to all the diseases that can come to you if you're malnourished so there was a phenomenon known as the coffin ships what were those Tyler? |
| 1:30.0 | So the coffin ships, that term refers to ships that came from Ireland to North America during the |
| 1:37.8 | famine on which a disease spread rapidly and large numbers of the immigrants before they even made it to America. |
| 1:47.0 | There were diseases like cholera, which was a waterborne illness or typhus which is a disease that you got that was spread by body |
| 1:56.9 | lice on the ships and when you're packed in stairs together you're sharing beds with multiple people, often strangers, and so it was easy to get something |
| 2:07.8 | like typhus which was spread by lice jumping from one closely packed body to another. |
| 2:13.2 | Now only a tiny fraction of the famine immigrants would have come on |
| 2:18.2 | on coffin ships because there weren't that many of them |
| 2:21.0 | and once it became clear what was happening on them new |
| 2:26.1 | regulations were put in place to prevent such huge disease on ships but still |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.