HTW Live: Busting the Myths of Irish Immigration — Recorded at the Tenement Museum
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
March 18, 1879. A crowd gathers around an indoor track in Brooklyn, NY, as an Irish immigrant named Bartholomew O’Donnell attempts a strange feat: walking 80 miles in 26 hours. Newspapers claim he’s eighty years old. Lap after lap, he circles the track: smoking a pipe, sipping hot tea, and pushing through the night.
O’Donnell came to New York thirty years earlier, fleeing the Great Potato Famine. Like many Irish immigrants, he spent decades doing manual labor and trying to get ahead in a city that often viewed newcomers with suspicion.
For generations, stories like his shaped how historians understood famine-era Irish immigrants.
In this special live episode recorded at the Tenement Museum ahead of St. Patrick’s Day, Sally speaks with historian Tyler Anbinder, author of Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York, about what new research reveals about the lives of Irish immigrants in America, and what their story can tell us about immigration today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:04.2 | Hey, History This Week, listeners. This week, we have something special for you. It is our first ever live event, which was recorded at the Tenement Museum on New York City's Lower East Side. It is a conversation between me and historian Tyler Anbinder about his book Plentiful Country, which explores |
| 0:22.7 | the lives of Irish immigrants who came to New York during the Great Potato Famine. |
| 0:27.5 | So after our opening scene, you'll hear something a little different. I loved this |
| 0:32.3 | conversation with Tyler, and I think you will too. |
| 0:41.0 | History of and I think you will too. History this week. |
| 0:43.3 | March 18, 1979. |
| 0:48.9 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 1:01.6 | A crowd has gathered around an indoor track in Brooklyn to witness something extraordinary. |
| 1:09.9 | A man named Bartholomew O'Donnell has promised that he is going to pull off a bizarre feat of strength. |
| 1:13.7 | He is going to walk 80 miles on this track in the next 26 hours. He'll start promptly at 8 p.m. and finish tomorrow at 10 in the evening. |
| 1:21.6 | It's not a super long track, so he'll have to circle it 2,240 times. |
| 1:28.2 | And not only that, as the newspapers have been eagerly reporting, |
| 1:32.9 | Bartholomeo O'Donnell is 80 years old. |
| 1:41.5 | The gathered spectators are pretty sure that he's not going to be able to do it. |
| 1:46.0 | But when the clock strikes eight, they cheer, and old Bartholomew O'Donnell starts walking. |
| 2:02.9 | Bartholomew has a secret. |
| 2:07.3 | He is not, in fact, 80 years old, as he has been telling the newspapers. |
| 2:10.2 | He's probably in his early 60s. |
| 2:18.1 | But he needed to drum up some excitement for this stunt, because Bartholomew O'Donnell needs some cash. |
| 2:24.4 | He's been doing manual labor and odd jobs in New York City for the past 30 years. He first arrived in January 1849 as an Irish immigrant fleeing the Great Potato Famine. |
| 2:32.8 | His family moved to five points, an overcrowded slum in lower Manhattan, packed with other |
... |
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