The Irish in the South, 1815-1877

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The Irish in the South, 1815-1877. By David T. Gleeson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xii, 278; $45.00, cloth; $19.95 paper.)

Historians of the field of southern white ethnocultural history have produced valuable community studies for a considerable variety of ethnocultural groups, but few have attempted analyses embracing all or most of the region. David Gleeson's study of Irish immigrants in the eleven states of the lower and upper South is a most welcome first of its kind.

Gleeson incorporates local studies by other historians of the nineteenth-century Irish in several southern communities, but this work goes far beyond historiographical …