Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855 (Hardcover)

by J. Matthew Gallman (Author) "In July 1847 eighteen-year-old Ann Murphy left home for Belfast on a journey that would eventually lead her to Philadelphia..." (more)
Key Phrases: famine migrants, famine migration, fever sheds, New York, Board of Health, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"A book that makes a welcome contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century urban history.

Historian

[This book] makes an important contribution to both immigration and urban history as well as to the history of public welfare.

Reviews in American History

This is a truly impressive study of comparative urban development.

Roger Lane, Haverford College

Gallman engages in a fascinating way with big questions of the national characters of the United States and Britain.

Jon Gjerde, University of California, Berkeley --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Description
During the Irish famine 2,000,000 Irish men and women fled their homeland to settle in large British and American cities already wrestling complex urban problems. This book examines how the cities of Liverpool and Philadelphia met the challenge of this influx of immigrants.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 306 pages
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press (May 29, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807825344
• ISBN-13: 978-0807825341
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,080,079 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Philadelphia: Microcosm of America, December 5, 2005

By	A. E. Poe (Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855 (Paperback)

J. Matthew Gallman, in Receiving Erin's Children, analyzes how two demographically similar cities, Liverpool, England, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the 1840s and 1850s handled the large influx of refuges from the Irish potato famine. Purporting to discuss immigration issues, the book is more a social study of how different cultures responded to similar rising urban problems such as poverty and crime. Both Liverpool and Philadelphia were ports with growing populations. "Poverty, sanitation, housing, disease, sectarian and ethnic conflict, crime and policing, education and delinquency...had been ongoing subjects of public debate in both cities." (pp. 211-12) Gallman found that the resolution of these issues depended upon the "material conditions, dominant ideologies, and the magnitude of the migration in each port." (p. 212)
England with its small land mass and large population took a broader more public view of handling social issues. The poor were numerous and encroaching upon the middle and upper classes. Although the poor provided a useful labor force for the cities, their issues were becoming common issues which needed a centralized governmental response. On the other extreme, the United States had a large land mass with most of its population living along its eastern coast. The poor had the opportunity to improve their condition by moving westward. Social problems such as sanitation and crime were viewed as local problems that could be obviated by inducing the poor to move elsewhere. The concept of the frontier was distinctly American and colored the American responses to many social issues.
In England, there had evolved an acceptance of a hierarchy. The government was expected to act on behalf of its citizenry. Whereas, the United States had a strong cultural commitment to voluntarism. There was, and continues to be, a common distrust of centralized bureaucracies and of decisions being made in a hierarchical fashion. The United States, and Philadelphia in particular, consisted of numerous philanthropic societies and benevolent institutions that handled in their own ways with little oversight the problems that they found and chose to handle. The United States had little use for a federal form of internal government at this time.
Although England had a large immigrant population from Ireland, it did not have the diversity of the United States which was already a melting pot of European and African cultures. The Irish were considered to be outsiders by the English but there was no intention of making them conform to "English" ways. The Irish had always been neighbors living in close proximity to England; their culture was not unknown to the English-their culture was not a threat. The opposite was true in the United States. Immigrants were outsiders but because they all came from far away, their cultures were strange and threatening. There grew an impulse amongst Americans to acculturate immigrants quickly. The Irish also arrived a rung up on the social ladder, with Africans remaining on the bottom rung. This immediate movement upward was also threatening. Traditional animosities between nations continued as a microcosm in the new world.
"The crux of this study has been a comparison of choices-as they were made at roughly the same time in two different cities." (p. 224) The methods developed to deal with emerging social issues reflected how the two nations had handled social issues in the past. There was not yet a need to reinvent a new social construct. The English continued to rule and solve problems from the top down and the United States, though growing more democratic, continued to view its issues locally.