The Americanisation of Ireland

David Fitzpatrick (1948–2019) was a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin where he lectured from 1979 to 2015. He pioneered many fields within modern Irish history, including the analysis of personal testimony to illuminate migration and the Irish diaspora, the Irish experience of revolution and civil war as revealed in local sources, the transformative impact of the First World War, and the underlying affinities between Ireland's Protestant and Catholic communities. His understanding of such complexities was enhanced by living in Belfast from 1999 to 2019. His most recent books included Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories since 1795 (2014) and Ernest Blythe in Ulster: The Making of a Double Agent? (2018).

• Prologue; Ireland's American question; 1. Beyond emigration; 2. Cosmopolitan Ireland, 1841–1911; 3. America on show, 1901–1911: profile; 4. America on show: people; 5. America on show: special cases; 6. Americans in Leitrim, 1901–1911: profile; 7. Americans in Leitrim: people; 8. Visitors from America, 1914–1925: profile; 9. Visitors from America: motives; 10. Visitors from America: faces; Epilogue; Questions unanswered.

'This splendid study is classic Fitzpatrick: a mixture of imaginative, and sometimes provocative, question-framing with rigorous hypothesis testing. Reverse migration is a topic rarely touched in Irish historical work; this will be recognised as a genuinely seminal work.' Donald H. Akenson, Queen's University, Ontario