Ballykilcline rising; from famine Ireland to immigrant America.

9781558496590

Ballykilcline rising; from famine Ireland to immigrant America.

Dunn, Mary Lee.

U. of Massachusetts Press

2008

218 pages

$28.95

Hardcover

F59

Dunn (affiliated with the graduate Department of Work Environment, U. of Massachusetts Lowell) traces the travels and travails of a group of Irish immigrants from the Great Famine years who, uprooted by the Crown from Ballykilcline in County Roscommon in response to a prolonged rent strike, settled in Rutland, Vermont and became involved in the marble industry. Her focus is on the process of class formation in the pre-history of the strike and the immigrants' exercise of agency as they reconstituted their class identity, drawing on communal memory. She explores agency in terms of acquisition of assets, Fenian activity, decisions concerning the American Civil War, and community-building in Rutland.

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