This book describes the flowering of the Irish American community and the 1890s growth of a Gaelic public sphere in Philadelphia, a movement inspired by the cultural awakening in native Ireland, transplanted and acted upon in Philadelphia’s robust Irish community. The Philadelphia Irish embraced this export of cultural nationalism, reveled in Gaelic symbols, and endorsed the Gaelic language, political nationalism, Celtic paramilitarism, Gaelic sport, and a broad ethnic culture.
Using Jurgen Habermas’s concept of a public sphere, the author reveals how the Irish constructed a plebian “counter” public of Gaelic meaning through various mechanisms of communication, the ethnic press, the meeting rooms of Irish societies, the consumption of circulating pamphlets, oratory, songs, ballads, poems, and conversation.
Settled in working class neighborhoods of vast spatial separation in an industrial city, the Irish resisted a parochialism identified with neighborhood and instead extended themselves to construct a vibrant, culturally engaged network of Irish rebirth in Philadelphia, a public of Gaelic meaning.
Introduction
1 Outlines of a Gaelic Public Sphere
2 Inserting the Gaelic in the Public Sphere
3 Irish Philadelphia in and out of the Gaelic Sphere
4 Transatlantic Origins of Irish American Voluntary Associations
5 A Microanalysis of Irish American Civic Life: Ireland’s Donegal and Cavan Emerge in Philadelphia
6 The Forging of a Collective Consciousness: Militant Irish Nationalism and Civic Life in Gaelic Philadelphia
7 Sport, Culture, and Nation among the Irish of Philadelphia
Conclusion: A Gaelic Public Sphere—Its Rise and Fall
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
