The Irish Immigrant Experience in Northeastern PA

Date: 4/15/2015
Time: 7:00 PM TO 8:30

Penn State Hazleton
Evelyn Graham Academic Building - Room 115
Hazleton, PA 18202

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Event Description: Join us at Penn State Hazleton for a discussion on the Molly Maguires, the culture of County Donegal, and the Irish immigrant experience in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Our speakers will be Mark Bulik and Breandán Mac Suibhne. Mark Bulik is the author of The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War (Fordham, 2015). He is also an assistant news editor at The New York Times, working on the front page of the newspaper and the homepage of the website. He also writes a weekly history feature about the first mentions in The Times of famous people and things, from Einstein to the airplane. Earlier in his career he was a reporter, columnist, editorial page editor and copy desk chief at various newspapers in the Philadelphia area. A graduate of Georgetown University, he is descended from several generations of Irish mineworkers in Schuylkill County. He lives in West Caldwell, N.J., with his wife, Barbara Hennessy, and their two children, Annie and Jack Bulik. Breandán Mac Suibhne is a historian of society and culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. His publications include an annotated edition of the longest lower-class account of Ireland's Great Famine, Hugh Dorian's The Outer Edge of Ulster (Dublin, 2000; South Bend, IN, 2001), and also a compendium of the travel-writing of Dr. John Gamble, Society and Manners in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2000). He is a native of west Donegal, a county which sent many young people to the hard-coal fields of Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century. At the meeting of the Greater Hazleton Historical Society, on Wednesday April 15, he will talk about the emergence of the Molly Maguires in west Donegal in the time of the Famine, and explore how that district adjusted to starvation and disease in the mid-nineteenth century, including increased migration to the anthracite region. Mac Suibhne is an occasional contributor to Dublin Review of Books, and a recent essay published in it on the connections between northeastern Pennsylvania and west Donegal can be read online at www.drb.ie


Directions:
Penn State Hazleton Evelyn Graham Academic Building Room 115

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