Class and Catholic Irish Masculinity in Antebellum America:
Young Men on the Make in Chicago.
PATRICIA KELLEHER

By M. Anastasia

Patricia Kelleher is an adjunct senior lecturer in History. She obtained her PhD at the University College of Dublin on the subject The Dynamic of power of an Irish Economic Elite. Her on-going research interests centre on marginalized communities and their social exclusion and she has published a lot in this area. Her article, Class and Catholic Irish Masculinity in Antebellum America: Young Men on the Make in Chicago, presents us the difficulty for young Catholic Irish men to find their place in the middle-class of the decades before the Civil War. By focusing on two young man, James A. Mulligan, “an extraordinary individual who enjoyed many advantages” and William J. Onahan, “a driven and reasonably talented person”, she shows us the complex social dynamics of antebellum Chicago, and the different strategies for these men to achieve success. By choosing to focus on these two, she traces the evolution of class during that period, and highlights the predominance of ethnicity.
It was published in the 4th number of the volume 28 of the Journal of American Ethnic History which was centered on the Irish immigration and ethnic history. This theme is not particularly original, neither are the sources. Many works has been published about the migration of Irish to the United States for the last decades such as Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States by M. Casey and J.J. Lee or Inventing Irish America: generation, class and ethnic identity in a New England City, 1880-1928 by Timothy Meagher. Since she focused her works on two young educated middle class men, the sources she used are diaries, letters, memoirs and newspaper articles which are not an innovation either. The interest of this article lays in the precision of the subject. She chose to study the American middle class but by