Mining Irish American Lives

Download or read book Mining Irish-American Lives written by Alan J. M. Noonan and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2022-09-29 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mining Irish-American Lives focuses on the importance and influence of the Irish within the mining frontier of the American West. Scholarship of the West has largely ignored the complicated lives of the Irish people in mining towns, whose life details are often kept to a bare minimum. This book uses individual stories and the histories of different communities—Randsburg, California; Virginia City, Nevada; Leadville, Colorado; Butte, Montana; Idaho’s Silver Valley; and the Comstock Lode, for example—to explore Irish and Irish-American lives. Historian Alan J. M. Noonan uses a range of previously overlooked sources, including collections of emigrant letters, hospital logbooks, private detective reports, and internment records, to tell the stories of Irish men and women who emigrated to mining towns to search for opportunity. Noonan details the periods, the places, and the experiences over multiple generations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He carefully examines their encounters with nativists, other ethnic groups, and mining companies to highlight the contested emergence of a hyphenated Irish-American identity. Unearthing personal details along with the histories of different communities, the book investigates Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans through the prism of their own experiences, significantly enriching the history of the period.