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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Eccentric Nation
ISBN# 9780838641385
Reviewed by: John P. Harrington, Fordham University
New York Irish History |
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Stephen Rohs takes the interesting premise of not looking for an emerging identity in America for Irish immigrants, and instead locates varieties of identities that could be imported into or fabricated within nineteenth-century New York City. He does not neglect the centripetal force of pressures toward a centralized and unifying identity linked to class, religion, and nationalism amongst Irish Americans. But he relishes the other force, centrifugal, which creates the eccentric, the complex, the contradictory, and all things associated with that word the subjects of this study did not have -- diversity.
From a wealth of material, Rohs chooses four events and contextualizes each. The first is the St. Patrick's Day Parade of 1855 described in tandem with a contemporary murder case. Next is Dion Boucicault's opening of The Colleen Bawn in 1860 and some of that year's St. Patrick's Day festivities. The third is, jointly, the Orange Riots of 1870 and 1871, along with some related street performances, and public press sensationalization of the Catholic presence in New York. The last links the opening of Harrigan and Hart's The Mulligan Guard Ball in 1879 and a six- day 450-mile endurance performance in "pedestrian walking."
None of these are under-researched in themselves, but Rohs has made them considerably more interesting by their company with each other. The narratives of each, produced by an impressive synthesis of primary and secondary sources, are quite compelling and rendered in that highly readable style of historical recreation that prizes the telling detail and tracks the curious subplot.
Rohs does not layer an excess of historical theory over the narrative of events, but an epilogue does effectively link the narratives to some of the prevailing American Studies paradigms such as "minstrelization" and historical ones such as "invented traditions." Eccentric Nation, built on works familiar to members of the New York Irish History Roundtable, will itself become an essential reference and an encouraging example of history with a higher than average toleration for the complexity of its subject.
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