Daniel Gomes

This project draws from the Newberry Library to uncover how nineteenth-century Irish immigrants used ballads to reimagine their identities and experiences in the United States. A form of narrative verse set to music and sung, the ballad was vital to maintaining a shared Irish American memory about the predominately rural communities from which they were wrenched through eviction and famine. Yet as documented by the broadsides and music sheets at the Newberry, the ballad was also a contested site of communal revision. Tracking the ballad's adaptability, this project chronicles how competing representations of “Irishness” took shape across Chicago, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia as well as recovers conflicting Irish American perspectives on the Civil War, gender and labor relations, and racialization amid nativist backlash.