MIGRANT VICTORY: 1/8: 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
🗓️ 3 September 2024
⏱️ 9 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.
1885 Van Gogh Potato Eaters
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I on the World with John Bachelor. It is 1896 in New York City, an exhibit called the Irish Palace, |
| 0:18.0 | and a woman in her 80s, Kate Murphy approaches the Irish Palace. |
| 0:24.4 | There's a rope line around this vast floor decoration, |
| 0:29.1 | 25 by 25 feet. |
| 0:31.9 | And on that floor is painted the counties of Ireland and each county has |
| 0:39.0 | soil from that county that's been brought specially to New York for the Irish Palace. |
| 0:45.3 | Kate Murphy must pay money to enter into this space to find her county for Manna. |
| 0:55.0 | This vivid scene is part of a storytelling of the Irish in New York. |
| 1:02.2 | The book is plentiful country. The great. the and Binder. He is the author and the compiler of this enormously helpful data to understand New York |
| 1:18.0 | City here in the 21st century, to understand the stories of New York City the last 200 years from the Civil War onward. |
| 1:27.0 | Professor, congratulations and a very good evening to you. |
| 1:30.0 | It's a great pleasure to talk Irish especially because it's so much around me wherever |
| 1:36.8 | I am I'm in Connecticut now Irish around me here right across the border, Irish everywhere. |
| 1:43.0 | But once upon a time, the Irish were relatively rare in New York City before the crisis, the tragedy. |
| 1:51.0 | Who is Kate Murphy and what does she do after she pays her few pennies to enter this enormous map of Ireland? |
| 1:58.0 | Good evening to you. |
| 2:00.0 | Good evening, it's great to be with you. |
| 2:06.0 | Kate Murphy has lived in New York for decades. She's worked as a domestic servant. She's come from Ireland decades ago and like most immigrants is somewhat homesick and misses her |
| 2:17.8 | her homeland and so in 1896 when there's this fundraising event held in this effort to build a memorial to the to the Irish in America and in particular to the Irish who came during the great famine 50 years earlier, they come up with this idea of building this giant map of Ireland and sending someone to Ireland to bring back soil from each of the 32 counties and place that soil within this |
| 2:46.8 | large floor map that you've described and then charge people admission to enter into the space and so that they once again can stand on their native soil. |
| 2:56.8 | And so Kate Murphy goes on to the map, walks to the middle, which is where Fermana is, and she is so moved by the thought of once again |
| 3:06.2 | standing on the old sod that she gets down on her hands and knees and kisses |
... |
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