The Fighting Irish: A History

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will explore how and why the Irish adapted to an often-troubling New World. It will examine how those already in America understood them, and how the Irish came to understand themselves. We will do so from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. As we will discover, the Irish moved through the marginal areas of the broader Atlantic world. These were often violence marchlands, and this shaped their culture and the ways that others saw them. We will focus on how the Irish were seen to be an especially violent group, and how they took a term of abuse - The "Fighting Irish" - and turned into an ethnic marker of pride. Irish-American respectability was rooted in nostalgia for the violent past, and this sensibility helps explain why they dominated prize-fighting for a long time in the United States To do all this, we will view the Irish-American experience from Atlantic, global, and comparative perspectives. We will, of course, cover traditional topics, such as labor, politics, and religion. And we will encounter many colorful characters and fascinating stories. But we will do so by viewing the Irish who came to America as part of a broader, dynamic diaspora. Viewing migration to the American colonies (including the Caribbean) and the United States from this vantage point means that we must consider the changing relationship between Ireland and America, as well as the ways in which both regions were parts of broader economic and cultural systems. We will also see how the process of adaptation in America differed from the ones in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Argentina, and Canada - all places the Irish ventured to. Needless to say, we will cover the history of both sending and receiving societies in rigorous fashion. Only by doing this sort of work can we understand what defined the Irish-American experience, as well as the idea of the Fighting Irish. We will also spend some time discussing why Notre Dame would embrace the idea of the Fighting Irish and how that has changed over time.