Description
Book SynopsisFrom the 1660s to the early 1900s, no fewer than seven million people emigrated from Ireland to North America. This vast flow at once reflected and compelled enormous social changes on both sides of the Atlantic. In this book Miller chronicles the momentous causes of the Irish emigration and its far-reaching impact - on the people themselves, on the land they left behind, and on the new one they came to. Drawing on enormous original research, Miller focuses on the thought and behaviour of the ordinary Irish emigrants, Catholic and Protestant, as revealed in their personal letters, diaries, journals, and memoirs as well as in their songs, poems, and folklore. Monumental in scope, Emigrants and Exiles embraces all the successive waves of Irish emigration, illuminating their differences as well as their common bonds.
Trade Reviewa very readable treatment of this theme ... vivid pictures spike his documentary which bring to recognition, if only for a moment, the ordinary figures
This is a truly monumental work of scholarship. * Sunday Times *
This is the most important book on Irish emigration to appear in a generation, and it is destined to be the monument by which all others are measured. * Irish America *
remarkable book ... a prodigiously researched account of one of the great folk movements of history * Michael Heale, TLS *
Kerby Miller has written what is likely to remain for some time the standard work on Irish emigration to the United States. His book is a prime example of the detailed, myth-shattering Irish historical literature of the 1980s. Both in the quality of its argument and in its vast range of interesting detail it constitutes a considerable achievement. * Michael A. Hopkinson, University of Stirling, Irish Historical Studies *
