The Irish Diaspora in Comparative Perspective: St. John's, Newfoundland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Portland, Maine, 1880-1923
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whether they settled in Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, or elsewhere, there was no common experience for the Irish abroad. Emigrants from Ireland and their descendants reshaped their ethnic identities in response to circumstances in both the old world and the new. A comparative study of three Irish-Catholic communities in different stages of development reveals the extent to which Irish ethnicity varied over time and space. In St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, immigration from Ireland was a largely early-nineteenth century, pre-famine phenomenon, so by the 1880s the Irish-Catholic communities were long-established, overwhelmingly native-born, and had achieved relative political and economic independence. Those of Irish descent in St. John’s formed a majority of the city’s population, while in Halifax they were a strong minority. The Irish in Portland, Maine, by contrast, arrived during and after the potato famine of the 1840s, and were a smaller minority in a mostly Yankee-Protestant milieu. This comparative study of three port cities tests how varying new world contexts affected expressions of Irish ethnicity over several generations. Was a sense of “Irishness” transmitted generationally? How, and to what extent, could a sense of ethnic community be maintained? How did relations with other ethnoreligious groups influence identity? What was the role of religion, gender, and class? How did local and external forces combine to influence expressions and understandings of Irishness? By examining associational life, the Catholic Church, education, politics, and Irish nationalism, this study argues that Irish-Catholic communities cannot be understood in isolation. Identities were created and sustained by the complex interaction of local, regional, national, and transnational networks. Through such mechanisms as ethnic, benevolent, and nationalist associations, for example, Catholics of Irish birth or descent constructed their understandings of Irishness from outside sources, but the day-to-day expression of these identities was inherently local. At the same time, religion, class, and gender influenced how ethnicity was conceived and articulated, and these processes varied considerably both within and between these three cities. Together, the comparative study reveals how Irish ethnic identity varied from place to place and over time, and how three different Catholic communities on the prow of northeastern North America remained part of an interconnected, transnational Irish diaspora until well into the twentieth century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".