“Mobilizing Irish America in the Antebellum Lecture Hall”
— Tom F. Wright
“Tom F. Wright expands the geographic dimensions of popular lecturing, exploring the role of Irish immigrants on antebellum U.S. platforms and their challenges to an ‘Anglo-American commons’ that spanned the Atlantic. Focusing on such figures as Thomas Francis Meagher, John Mitchel, and John McElheran, Wright shows how such orators worked to reimagine and rearticulate a global Irish identity. Through spectacles of Irish nationalism and interrogations of ‘Celtic’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ racial theory, Irish immigrants carved a unique niche for themselves in transatlantic platform culture—a niche that Wright investigates to broaden our understanding of the people, topics, and goals that propelled popular education in the nineteenth century” (pp. 16).