- Book Talk
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Co-Sponsored by Merchants House Museum
This program is part of Village Preservation’s Semiquincentennial series of programs celebrating our Revolutionary Village. Revolutionary Village not only celebrates the founding of our country, but the exceptional role our neighborhoods played in its development and the realization of its ideals over the last 250 years and beyond.
From the award-winning author of Five Points and City of Dreams, a breathtaking new history of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Great Potato Famine, showing how their strivings in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America.
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.
Tyler Anbinder is a historian who specializes in American immigration history, the history of New York City, and the era of the American Civil War. He is the author of three award-winning books: Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (1992); Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (2001); and City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (2016). In 2024, he published Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York. He has won several major research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and held the Fulbright Commission’s Thomas Jefferson Distinguished Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht. His scholarship has garnered awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Columbia University School of Journalism, and the editors of Civil War History. He was a professor of history for thirty years—for the first four at the University of Wyoming and then for the final twenty-six at George Washington University, where he also served as chair of the History Department.
- Date
- Wednesday, March 25, 2026
- Time
- 6:00 pm
- Details
Webinar
Free
Pre-registration required