MIGRANT VICTORY: 2/8: 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
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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.
1807
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is John Bachelor. |
| 0:05.0 | I'm with Professor Tyler Ann Binder. |
| 0:09.0 | His new book is plentiful country. |
| 0:12.0 | The Great Potato Famine and The Making of Irish New York. as a |
| 0:15.0 | plentiful country, the great potato famine and the making of Irish New York. The potato famine is a story of a virus traveling over oceans |
| 0:22.0 | that were part of the route to explore the new world, but then |
| 0:27.1 | the products of the new world came back to Europe, and one particular product was potato seed. |
| 0:34.0 | Professor, I did not know where it came from. |
| 0:37.1 | I presumed it was, I mean, that it just originated in Ireland that is inaccurate. |
| 0:44.0 | Why did potato seed carry the virus? |
| 0:47.0 | Why didn't it take plant in say North America? |
| 0:50.0 | Thank you. |
| 1:00.4 | So the seed potatoes that the Irish used to grow their own potatoes because the way you grow potatoes is you put a little tiny potato in the ground and from it sprouts many |
| 1:05.0 | potatoes. The seed potatoes that the Irish used came from North America, especially from the United |
| 1:11.6 | States, and American farmers would fertilize |
| 1:16.7 | their crop with guano bird droppings that came from South America. |
| 1:21.4 | And apparently in those bird droppings there was a fungus and the fungus didn't really affect potato growth in the United States very much because we have hot dry summers and that would kill the fungus. |
| 1:35.8 | But in Ireland where you have cool damp summers, the fungus was able to thrive and multiply and in that way infect the crop of an entire nation. |
| 1:47.0 | The crop is the potato crop that was critical to feeding Ireland. This is another world where the British |
| 1:56.8 | Empire did not take responsibility for the lives of people of Ireland, but they did take responsibility for the profits. |
| 2:04.5 | So the professor takes us to the Landsdown Estate, which I see is at the border between Cork County and Cary County. This is the poorest of the poor. |
| 2:17.2 | When the potato famine struck was 45, 46 in that zone. at first they thought they could outlast it they thought that the next year's crop it would go away is that correct professor |
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