Review of Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815. Written and edited by Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle.
Date of this Version
Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing, Volume 31: 2010 ISSN 0196-7134
The Irish Diaspora and the influx of Irish immigrants to North America have received much attention in recent decades. The multitudes of Irish- Catholics arriving in the middle nineteenth century in the aftermath of Ireland’s Potato Famine have received the majority of this scholarly attention. In Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan, Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle tackle an often overlooked aspect of the Irish migration to North America, the largely Protestant immigrants arriving before the American Revolution and in its immediate aftermath. Using letters, and occasionally other sources such as personal memoirs and diaries, the authors seek to illuminate the immigrant experience of the “approximately four hundred thousand emigrants from Ireland who settled in North America between the late 1600s and the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815” (p. 4).