The story of Irish America has been told as a hungry rush towards assimilation and loyalty: a transformation from despised refugee to loyal American within a few generations. What Irish-America once told itself was a success story has lately been reexamined with a more jaundiced view. Scholarship in recent decades positions the Irish as the quintessential beneficiaries of social whiteness, able – eager – to transcend outsider status by participating in the exclusion and oppression of Black Americans. The Irish formed the backbone of the 19^th and 20^th century urban political machines and police forces that codified northern racism, enforced neighborhood segregation via territorial Catholic parishes, served as enthusiastic anti-Communists at midcentury and heartily adopted the privileges and injustices of a racialized society as they climbed the income ladder and moved to the suburbs.

While acknowledging the reality of that reading, this panel seeks to tell an additional story. The 19^th century Irish immigration presaged the now common and contemporary displacements caused by empire and environmental collapse (and their intersection). These were surplus people, problematic and unwanted under a Malthusian liberal economy, redeemable in America only in as much as they consented to the national project. Plenty did. But from the beginning of the mass Irish migration to its end when those on the losing side of the Irish Civil War made up a large portion of the 1920s tail, some retained clarity of their resentments, an ability to see injustice – or a disinclination to be blind to it. Irish names populate every radical movement in 19^th and 20^th Century U.S. history, but in popular memory radicals are somehow severed of their Irishness. This panel seeks to resuscitate an understudied and undertheorized Irish left in America. Forgotten, severed or buried by the triumphalist narrative official Irish-America tells itself and overlooked by newer more skeptical research, this collection of papers seeks to examine Irish radicals in America whose left politics were an outgrowth of their Irishness. This analysis posits Irish nationalism as a paradigm-shaping force that fostered allegiance with other oppressed populations. It situates the Irish freedom movement squarely among other anti-imperialist movements.

In the cases of the people examined in this panel, Irish nationalism, rather than an ethnic in-turning, served as a foundation from which sprung resistance to a variety of injustices applied to class, sex, race and indeed nation.

This research deepens and complicates our understanding of the nation's largest immigrant community. It seeks to uncover and reexamine a dissident vein in Irish American experience that's been excised from public memory. In doing so it positions the study of Irish in America as a key component in U.S. histories of free expression, labor agitation, feminism, civil rights and the repressions against those efforts.