Description
Book SynopsisTraces the rise of the Molly Maguires from Ireland’s devastating potato famine to the turbulent dawn of the American labor movement. With a heavy emphasis on the folk culture that underpinned the Mollies, the book documents the group’s Civil War rebirth in Pennsylvania, and its lasting influence.
Trade Review"Mark Bulik's The Sons of Molly Maguire is a superb work of scholarship. Focused on origins, this work situates the Irish emergence and American persistence of the Molly Maguires in all of their considerable complexity, while likewise ably revealing not only the crucial developments of the 1870s that have embedded the Mollies in American memory but also the factors contributing to the Mollies' continuing legacy extending into the present." -- -James P. Leary University of Wisconsin "Mark Bulik's 'The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War' is a work of considerable scholarship, which carefully unpicks the tightly braided strands of ethnic, labor and party politics in the mid-nineteenth-century coal fields, especially the west branch of Schuylkill County. Drawing on the extensive research, he illuminates the competition between the Irish and other immigrant groups, and, most interestingly, the regional, class and generation tensions within the Irish community itself." -- -Breandan Mac Suibhne Dublin Review of Books "Mark Bulik's The Sons of Molly Maguire is an engaging and enlightening work of historical research and scholarship. As well as bring into focus the Mollies' role in giving America its first taste of class warfare, Bulik's incisive and original explorations sweep aside myths, legends, half-truths, and untruths. He significantly deepens our understanding of these flesh-and blood laborers, who they were, where they came from, and how their struggle resonated through the labor movement in the United States. Thoughtful, insightful and unfailing fair, The Sons of the Molly Maguire is history at its best." -- -Peter Quinn author of Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America "With deft writing and impressive research, Mark Bulik offers a new explanation for a conflict that shook the very foundations of post-Civil War America. The Molly Maguires were at the center of America's first great labor war, but as Bulik shows, the first shots of that war were fired not in northeastern Pennsylvania, but in the fields and villages of Ireland." -- -Terry Golway author of Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics
Table of ContentsPART I
Introduction: The Fountainhead | 3
1 “A Slumbering Volcano” | 10
PART II
2 The Black Pig’s Realm | 25
3 The Secret Societies | 44
4 Land and Politics | 62
5 The Molly Maguires | 77
PART III
6 Brotherly Love | 109
7 The Hibernians | 122
8 Another Ulster | 139
9 Resurrection | 166
10 “Brave Sons of Molly” | 183
11 Mars in Mahantango | 193
12 “A Damned Hard Hole” | 203
13 “A Howling Wilderness” | 221
14 Parting Shots | 235
15 The Road to Black Thursday | 254
16 Shadows of the Gunmen | 288
Notes | 319
Index | 357
Illustrations follow page 182
