Best We Forget?:Irish Encounters with American Society

Engaging and provocative narrative history of the Irish in America told through personal life stories by a prize-winning historian.

Best We Forget? traces the searing experiences of Irish immigrants to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kerby A. Miller, one of the leading authorities on the history of the Irish in America, reads between the lines of personal letters and memoirs to uncover their true life stories. They faced great hardship, and some made - and lost - several fortunes. We follow, among others, a street peddler in Chicago’s Irish saloons, a Boston domestic servant homesick for Kilkenny, a Fenian revolutionary toiling in Montana’s copper mines, and a picaresque adventurer who found his way into the Hollywood silent-movie industry.

Miller evokes how immigrants coped in what Irish revolutionary James Connolly once called “the cold world of capitalist America.” Some retained their nationalist and militant politics; others set aside communal beliefs for the sake of individual success or family survival. Bitter truths about the corruption of American politics and the rapacity of its economy often went unspoken. What would the Irish want to remember, Miller asks - and what would they need to forget?

Praise for Emigrants and Exiles

“A remarkable achievement … a very readable book.”
Los Angeles Times

“Well worth reading … rich in information.”
New York Times