Afterword

As Ambassador Mulhall points out in his foreword to this volume, national identity does not arise out of the air, nor does diasporic identity. Both must be grounded in something, and both must have something to sustain them. As this book documents, print culture, particularly journalistic products, have played an important role in creating and maintaining Irish American identity—at least up until the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, American journalism itself has been influenced by Irish printers and journalists who immigrated to the New World and infused journalism with their knowledge, skills, and professional routines they were socialized in, as becomes clear from the contributions in this volume. The ambassador also observes that the Irish-American relationship is today somewhat more remote than it was in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the heyday of both Irish immigration and the transfer of journalists, news, news practices, and technologies between Ireland and the United States. In the early years of the twentieth century the ties between the Irish and the American Irish were extremely close, especially because so many of the latter vigorously supported Irish nationalism. The American perspective was often more anti-British than that of the native Irish. American Irish newspapers supported Irish freedom, although a tension existed between those who accepted the concept of “Home Rule,” meaning domestic self-rule within the British Empire, and those who supported complete independence. This division was reflected in the editorial perspectives of the major American Irish newspapers. The Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Dublin inflamed Irish America: it played a key role in the subsequent Anglo-Irish conflict (1919–21) which culminated in a British withdrawal