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HTW Live: Busting the Myths of Irish Immigration — Recorded at the Tenement Museum
Season 7 · Episode 4

HTW Live: Busting the Myths of Irish Immigration — Recorded at the Tenement Museum

For St. Patrick’s Day, we recorded our first-ever live episode from the Tenement Museum with historian Tyler Anbinder on famine-era Irish immigrants in America.

HISTORY This Week · The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios

March 16, 202640m 56s

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Show Notes

March 18, 1879. A crowd gathers around an indoor track in Brooklyn, NY, as an Irish immigrant named Bartholomew O’Donnell attempts a strange feat: walking 80 miles in 26 hours. Newspapers claim he’s eighty years old. Lap after lap, he circles the track: smoking a pipe, sipping hot tea, and pushing through the night.

O’Donnell came to New York thirty years earlier, fleeing the Great Potato Famine. Like many Irish immigrants, he spent decades doing manual labor and trying to get ahead in a city that often viewed newcomers with suspicion.

For generations, stories like his shaped how historians understood famine-era Irish immigrants.

In this special live episode recorded at the Tenement Museum ahead of St. Patrick’s Day, Sally speaks with historian Tyler Anbinder, author of Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York, about what new research reveals about the lives of Irish immigrants in America, and what their story can tell us about immigration today.

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