Battling the Anglo-Saxon Myth
Battling the Anglo-Saxon Myth
Irish Identity in the Antebellum United States, 1848–1861
This chapter looks at the contours of Irish American racial discourse between the arrival of the first Young Irelanders in the late 1840s to the United States and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. It challenges the truism that the Irish, in assimilating themselves in American society, had cut ties with their homeland and adopted a white identity, thus ceasing to be “Green.” As a matter of fact, American Anglo-Saxonism constituted a greater threat to these migrants than any alleged lack of whiteness. Rather than seek to become Saxon, however, Irish immigrants expanded the boundaries of American citizenship by depicting themselves as members of what one exile termed a proud and noble “world-wide race” of Celts.
Keywords: Irish American nationalism, racial discourse, Civil War, American Anglo-Saxonism, Celts, American citizenship, Irish immigrants
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