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Unpolished Emeralds In The Gem State: Hard-Rock Mining, Labor Unions, And Irish Nationalism In The Mountain West And Idaho, 1850-1900, Victor D. Higgins

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Irish immigration to the United States, extant since the 1600s, exponentially increased during the Irish Great Famine of 1845-52. For many Catholic Irish, the legacy of colonization and the Famine intensified an existing narrative of forced exile and dispossession. It also endowed them with a predisposition to identify similarities between colonial exploitation and capitalism. These factors fed a growing Irish nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic, protean in the 1700s, which reified in the 1800s, around Anglophobia. In the Mountain West where mining spearheaded exploration and settlement, the Irish made up the largest ethnic group in hard-rock mines in …