- Paperback: 348 pages
- Publisher: OUP USA (4 Jun 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0195116313
- ISBN-13: 978-0195116311
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16.4 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 120,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires
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Product Description
Review
Professor Kenny's scholarly work is a valuable addition to the literature on the Molly Maguires and an aid to understanding this tragic episode in the history of Irish-Ammerican immigrant labour. (Seanchas Ard Mhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society )
This terrific book adds much to our understanding of the Molly Maguires and provides details about the social and ethnic landscapes of eastern Pennsylvania. It also sheds new light on how many Irish Americans understood Catholicism. (American Historical Review )
Kevin Kenny weighs in with what seems like the definitiveword on the Molly Maguires ... his treatment of the Mollies is thoroughly researched and neatly balanced ... His excavation beneath the mythical qualities of the Molly Maguires is likely to be the standard work for some time. (Labor Studies Journal )
This terrific book adds much to our understanding of the Molly Maguires and provides details about the social and ethnic landscapes of eastern Pennsylvania. It also sheds new light on how many Irish Americans understood Catholicism. (American Historical Review )
Kevin Kenny weighs in with what seems like the definitiveword on the Molly Maguires ... his treatment of the Mollies is thoroughly researched and neatly balanced ... His excavation beneath the mythical qualities of the Molly Maguires is likely to be the standard work for some time. (Labor Studies Journal )
Product Description
Twenty Irish immigrants, suspected of comprising a secret terrorist organization called the Molly Maguires, were executed in Pennsylvania in the 1870s for the murder of sixteen men. Ever since, there has been enormous disagreement over who the Molly Maguires were, what they did, and why they did it, as virtually everything we now know about the Molly Maguires is based on hostile descriptions of their contemporaries. Arguing that such sources are inadequate to serve as the basis for a factual narrative, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires examines the ideology behind contemporary evidence to explain how and why a particular meaning came to be associated with the Molly Maguires in Ireland and Pennsylvania. At the same time, this work examines new archival evidence from Ireland that establishes that the American Molly Maguires were a rare transatlantic strand of the violent protest endemic in the Irish countryside. Combining social and cultural history, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires offers a new explanation of who the Molly Maguires were, as well as why people wrote and believed such curious things about them. In the process, it vividly retells one of the classic stories of American labour and immigration.
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First Sentence
Contrary to the nineteenth-century conspiracy theorists, it is highly unlikely that an organization called the "Molly Maguires" was imported directly from Ireland to the United States. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Contrary to the nineteenth-century conspiracy theorists, it is highly unlikely that an organization called the "Molly Maguires" was imported directly from Ireland to the United States. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Molly Maguire Era is one of the most tangled and complex in United States history. Kevin Kenny has done a masterful job of untangling the complexities and cross currents involved here. There was more evil than enough on both sides of the conflict. New evidence compiled in the last twenty years puts a very different light on this woeful period of American history.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A very well-researched and detailed account of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania. Cuts through the myths and concentrates on the facts. Gives a very good depiction of life in the coal region at the time (much of the language, culture, etc. is still present in the region today). Also good background information on the Mollies origins in Ireland. A very scholarly work.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is the definitive work on one of the most obscure and easily misunderstood episodes in the history of the United States between 1865 and 1901. Kenny demonstrates that the outbreak of Irish-related violence in the anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania in the 1860s and 1870s was fundamentally a reflection of the area's sharpening confrontation between capital and labour. Working conditions and wages in the mines were a constant source of grievance, and there was ample scope for ethnic rivalries involving nativist Americans as well as English, Welsh and Irish immigrants. At the same time, the Irish drew on a tradition of violent protest against social conditions that was rooted in the rural areas of north-west and northern Ireland where most of them originated. The Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania were not some terrible, far-reaching conspiracy, as alleged at the time by prosecutors, Pinkerton private detectives and the press. But there was indeed a minority of Irish-born individuals willing to kill mining officials and destroy property. Public hysteria was deliberately whipped up by those, such as the railroad and mining companies, with a clear interest in breaking the union movement. As Kenny shows, the trials that led to the hangings of 20 alleged Molly Maguires were in many respects a travesty of justice. But if they suppressed "Molly Maguireism" forever, they did not stop violent assaults by public and semi-public authorities on American trade unionists for decades to come.
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