The end of hidden Ireland : rebellion, famine, and emigration / Robert James Scally.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Many thousands of Irish peasants fled from the country in the terrible famine winter of 1847-48, following the road to the ports and the Liverpool ferries to make the dangerous passage across the Atlantic. The human toll of "Black '47," the worst year of the famine, is notorious, but the lives of the emigrants themselves have remained largely hidden, untold because of their previous obscurity and deep poverty. In The End of Hidden Ireland, Scally brings their lives to light. Focusing on the townland of Ballykilcline in Roscommon, Scally offers a richly detailed portrait of Irish rural life on the eve of the catastrophe. From their internal lives and values, to their violent conflict with the English Crown, from rent strikes to the potato blight, he takes the emigrants on each stage of their journey out of Ireland to New York. Along the way, he offers rare insights into the character and mentality of the immigrants as they arrived in America in their millions during the famine years. Hailed as a distinguished work of social history, this book also is a tale of adventure and human survival, one that does justice to a tragic generation with sympathy but without sentiment.

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Publishers Weekly Review

During the winter of 1847-48-``Black '47''-when the potato famine ravaged Ireland, the town of Ballykilcline, County Roscommon, was hit hard. The problem ``was above all about food, and therefore about land.'' Hopelessly behind in paying their rent, the tenant-farmers rebelled. Those who had taken advantage of an offer from their landlord, Major Mahon, and left for Canada perished en route. News of the disaster reached Ballykilcline and Mahon was murdered. Recriminations followed about ``Papist plots'' on the landlord's side met by stalwart resistance on the part of the tenants. This study of the Irish land system and the effects of the great famine shows how the land was divided; the influence of the ``Gentlemen and the Squireens''; the hatred of the peasants for the ``drivers''-the landlords' rent collectors and evicters; and the peasants' eventual emigration (paid for by the British crown) and their new lives in the United States. Scally is professor of history and director of the Glucksman Ireland House at New York University. His account will be of particular interest to academicians. Illustrated. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Scally has written a highly original book whose impressive scholarship makes a significant contribution to understanding 19th-century Irish and North American history. At the height of the Great Famine in 1847-8, the Crown evicted 470-odd tenants living in the townland of Ballykilcline, near Strokestown, County Roscommon, and sponsored their emigration to the US. Scally reconstructs the social environment and mental world of these people with great skill and perceptiveness as he untangles the fascinating web of events that led, after a decade-long wrangle over rents, to their removal. The importance of this book lies in its depiction of these events from the perspective of the victims, particularly the process of their eviction and the journey to Liverpool and New York. This is microhistory at its best, using a small setting to expand knowledge of bigger events. It is also splendidly written and deserves a wide readership. Photographs and useful footnotes. All levels. G. Owens; Huron College

Kirkus Book Review

A good academic history of a small community in Ireland whose inhabitants died or migrated to the US during the famine of 1847- 48. Ballykilcline, a community of about 100 families, disappeared after the famine from the local estate surveys and ordnance maps; it survives in the records accumulated during an 11-year rent strike against the Crown, which the tenants lost in 1846, and in accounts of the 1847 murder of Denis Mahon, heir to the area's greatest estate. The murder in particular caused a sensation: Viewed by some as a rapacious landlord's deserved comeuppance, and by the forces of order as a sign of widespread conspiracy among the lower classes, it ``catalyzed feelings at all levels of local society.'' Using these events as a framework, Scally (History/New York Univ.) tries to give a sense of the lives, thoughts, and experiences of Ballykilcline's inhabitants--although he notes that records kept by those who collected rents or enforced the law do not give much insight into the minds of the people with whom they dealt. It was a terrible time: The potato crop, the staple food of the peasantry, rotted for the second successive year in 1847, and the new notion of assisted emigration began to seem an enlightened alternative to eviction. Emigrants walked to Dublin, passing along the way ``starving stragglers and wanderers, casual burials, and exposed corpses, all suffused with the smell of the decaying potato fields.'' The destitution of those arriving in Liverpool prior to the Atlantic voyage stunned Herman Melville, though he had seen poverty in New York City. Mortality on the voyage can't, says Scally, be compared to that on the slave ships, but one emigrant in five, by conservative estimate, died on board or in quarantine after landing. Well written and well researched, a distinct contribution to the subject, even if land and legal records do not do justice to the agony of the times.