Great Famine

who the Fenians were.

He's in Ireland in 1862 and this is only a decade and a half after the start of the Great Potato Famine or more accurately I guess is how Irish people or a lot of Irish people would prefer you call it the Great Hunger.

And so the Irish potato famine or the Great Hunger in a nutshell was that the potatoes got blight.

They got a disease that started in 1845, meaning that the potato crop in Ireland failed.

It was the main foodstuff of many people in Ireland, but particularly the sort of rural poor.

Yeah, I got to interview her, and she is a genius.

And that book is perfect and beautiful and, as you know, set in Ireland during the Great Potato Famine.

So just a couple hundred years after...

Grace's story takes place.

Sure.

Thinking back, what inspired that seismic shift in your career path? And I wonder, you're Irish, right? Did growing up in Ireland, where obviously like the history of the Great Famine have an impact on you as a kid? And is that something that's instilled in everyone that's Irish? Never forget the Great Famine and its effect on our people and the place where we live and call home.

Yeah, that's huge.

In the Irish language, it's on Gortormor, the great hunger brought famine.

Halloween underwent another transformation as it became more established in the United States.

Irish and Scottish immigrants brought their customs with them, especially during the 19th century when the Irish immigrated to the United States due to the Great Famine.

But American Halloween wasn't always the family-friendly candy festival we know today.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Halloween had developed a reputation for pranks and vandalism, which I guess it still does today, but maybe not to the extreme.

So Catholic Relief Services and the relevance of Irish Americans to the leadership of The main point here is that Irish Americans were the dominant force in American Catholic leadership before Vatican II.

And with a specific history, a legacy of the Great Famine, immigration, diaspora, and race allowed Irish Americans to become Catholic leaders in American society in the pre-Vatican II era.

These were clerical leaders with Irish heritage.

They had the historical experiences with the threat of famine, as well as social progressivism, rebuilding and acculturation processes of the immigrant experience of East Coast cities in the United States.

And if we really want to understand communism, the capitalism, we have to get back, well, from the Cold War back into the 19th century, the social question.

And here we focus on the essential leadership role of Irish Americans and their historically informed experience and understanding of hunger politics to understand how European civilization was stabilized and reconstructed during and after World War II.

Now, the Great Famine or the Irish Potato Famine resulted in waves of immigration in the 1850s, mostly to the United States of America.

The point for American history, too, is that Irish immigrants got in at the right time before the frontiers closed, before immigration quotas of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Sure.

And while there were some versions of Halloween brought over from England when the colonies were sort of being populated, it wasn't until a wave of Irish immigrants came across the sea in 1820 fleeing the Great Famine that Halloween began to take hold.

Irish girls peeled apples, roasted nuts, unraveled yarn.

stared into mirrors, dipped their hands into a series of bowls while blindfolded, cooked dinners in silence, and played with fire to find out whether and whom they would marry.

Disguises, bonfires, lanterns carved from turnips, and a lot of fortune-telling.

The Scots-Irish carried some of those customs down the wagon road in the 1700s, but a lot of them were Presbyterians who didn't care for anything that smelt like a Catholic holiday, so the customs didn't survive as a big public festival.

They survived his games.

Things you did in the kitchen with apples.