Explore the vast range of titles available.

\" Winner of the American Conference for Irish Studies Prize for Literary Criticism The Irish Voice in America surveys the fiction written by the Irish in America over the past two hundred and fifty years. For this second edition, Fanning has added a chapter that covers the fiction of the past decade. He argues that contemporary writers continue to draw on Ireland as a source and are important chroniclers of the modern American experience.

Finley Peter Dunne, American journalist and humorist, is justly famous for his creation of Mr. Dooley, the Chicago Irish barkeep whose weekly commentary on national politics, war, and human nature kept Americans chuckling over their newspapers for nearly two decades at the beginning of this century. Largely forgotten in the files of Chicago newspapers, however, are over 300 Mr. Dooley columns written in the 1890s before national syndication made his name a household word. Charles Fanning offers here the first critical examination of these early Dooley pieces, which, far better than the later ones, reveal the depth and development of the character and his creator. Dunne created in Mr. Dooley a vehicle for expressing his criticism of Chicago's corruption despite the conservatism of most of his publishers. Dishonest officials who could not be safely attacked in plain English could be roasted with impunity in the \"pure Roscommon brogue\" of a fictional comic Irishman. In addition, Dunne painted, through the observations of his comic persona, a vivid and often poignant portrait of the daily life of Chicago's working-class Irish community and the impact of assimilation into American life. He also offered cogent views of American urban political life, already dominated by the Irish as firmly in Chicago as in other large American cities, and of the tragicomic phenomenon of Irish nationalism. Mr. Fanning's penetrating examination of these early Dooley pieces clearly establishes Dunne as far more than a mere humorist. Behind Mr. Dooley's marvelously comic pose and ironic tone lies a wealth of material germane to the social and literary history of turn-of-the century America.

In this study, Charles Fanning has written the first general account of the origins and development of a literary tradition among American writers of Irish birth or background who have explored the Irish immigrant or ethnic experience in works of fiction.

Irish traditional music has been thriving in the US for many years now, with festivals, concerts, workshops, university and community courses, and an abundance of regular pub seisuns and gigs. But this was not always the case. There was an upsurge of interest in the mid-1920s, stimulated by increased immigration from Ireland and a brief investment in the music by commercial recording companies. Here, Fanning talks about Eleanor Kane Neary and the piano in Irish traditional music. There were some late rewards for Neary's lifetime of remarkable artistry. She lived to see the revival of interest in traditional Irish music from the mid-1970s, and to contribute to it as a nurturing spirit for the new generation of Chicago musicians who were afforded many more opportunities than had been available to her.

Taking a longue durée view over the 20th century, “Empire of the Everglades” examines how the consolidation and contestation of the corporate food system and industrial agriculture in South Florida transformed the region from a “river of grass” into an expansive commodity-production hub and moved the region’s farmworkers to build community and organize for change. It bridges the local and global to show how South Florida’s sugar and vegetable growers generated profits by anchoring the region to corporate food supply chains through economic and political organization, the deployment of environmental management technologies that remade the vast Everglades ecosystem, and the construction of new systems of migrant labor recruitment that spanned the Americas. In uplifting the region’s farmworkers’ experiences and organizing, this dissertation also illuminates the resilience of migrant farmworkers and their communities and powerful moments of solidarity amid poverty, exploitation, and social and legal exclusion. Over time, farmworkers built organizations and civil society networks to counter the sector’s means of labor control and forged new community resources and movements for corporate accountability and environmental justice. Examining class formation and conflict in the Everglade’s agricultural sector as it unfolded in a changing environment and amid shifting agribusiness practices and immigration patterns, this work reveals how the corporate food system worked to externalize the costs of low-priced food on the environment, workers, and rural communities, as well as the dynamism and impact of the state’s under-examined farmworkers’ movement.

ON FEBRUARY 24, 1890, the United States Congress crowned Chicago the archetypal American city by appointing her hostess for the national celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. On April 30, 1893, one year behind schedule, President Grover Cleveland and Chicago Mayor Carter H. Harrison officially opened the World’s Columbian Exposition, a fairyland extravaganza of plaster and whitewash in Jackson Park on the shores of Lake Michigan. Unfortunately, that sunny spring of self-congratulation was followed by the worst winter of poverty, homelessness, and starvation in the city’s history—the “Black Winter” of 1893–1894,

MR. DOOLEY did not wake from uneasy dreams to find himself suddenly changed into a national sage. His timely satiric illuminations of American folly in the Spanish-American War marked the final step in what was a gradual transformation from spokesman and chronicler of the Chicago Irish community to commentator on the affairs of America and the world. In fact, a three-stage progression to his ultimate role is observable in a chronological reading of all the Chicago pieces. Mr. Dooley’s interests had never been narrowly parochial. From the beginning he was a habitual reader of “th’ pa-apers,” commenting on national and