“What are the Irish Catholics Fighting for?”: The Pilot’s Creation of An Alternative Archive to American Nativist Amnesia During the Civil War*
An institution with its very own systems of remembering,
forgetting, memorizing and presenting, the Boston Pilot, an Irish
ethnic newspaper, directly and indirectly aimed to shape an identity
for the Irish community in the United States. Parallel to many
alternative systems of archiving, the Pilot distrusted the archive of the
hegemonic other and created an archival organization to avoid societal
and historical amnesia. In this sense, the series of “Records of IrishAmerican Patriotism” written by Michael Hennessy is an important
asset for the paper as the series documents the heroic acts of the
Irish Brigade and Irish American soldiers, and creates an alternative
archive of its own together with the news and editorials published in
the Pilot. Additionally, the Pilot’s racially motivated lexicon over the
course of the Civil War will be analyzed to understand further how
this alternative archive influenced its readers and their perception of
African Americans.
___
- Allen, Theodore W. The Invention of the White Race, vol: I—Racial
Oppression and Social Control. Verso, 1994.
- Bailyn, Bernard, Robert Dallek, David Brion Davis, David Herbert
Donald, John L. Thomas, Gordon S. Wood, eds. The Great
Republic: A History of the American People. 3rd Ed. D.C. Heath
and Company, 1985.
- Bennett, Michael J. “Saving Jack: Religion, Benevolent Organizations,
and Union Sailors during the Civil War.” Union Soldiers and
the Northern Home Front Wartime Experiences, Postwar
Adjustments edited by Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller,
Fordham UP, 2002.
- Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says
About Race in America. Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Featherstone, Mike. “Archive.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23,
no:2-3, 2006, pp. 591-596.
- Foik, Paul Joseph. Pioneer Catholic Journalism. Monograph Series
(United States Catholic Historical Society) ; v. 11. Greenwood
Press, 1969.
- Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review vol.
106, no. 8, 1993, pp. 1707-1791.
- Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme,
Myth, Reality. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
- Ignatiev, Noel. How The Irish Became White. Routledge Classics,
2009.
- Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European
Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard UP, 1998.
Lynch, Michael. “Archives in Formation: Privileged Spaces, Popular
Archives and Paper Trails.” History of the Human Sciences,
vol.12, no. 2, 1999, pp. 65-87.
- MacNamara, Daniel George. The History of the Ninth Regiment:
- Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Second Brigade, First
Division, Fifth Army Corps, Army of the Potomac. E. B. Stillings
& Co., Printers, 1899.
- Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to
North America. Oxford UP, 1988.
- The Pilot [Boston]. Vol. 21, no. 1 (2 Jan. 1858)-vol. 28, no. 52 (30
Dec. 1865). Center for Research Libraries, http://catalog.crl.
edu/record=b2843127~S1.
- The Pilot [Boston]. Vol. 29, no.1 (6 Jan. 1866)-. Roman Catholic
Archdiocese of Boston Archive, Boston College Theology and
Ministry Library, Chestnutt Hill.
- O’Connor, Thomas. Boston Catholics: A History of the Church and Its
People. Northeastern UP, 1998.
- O’Grady, Joseph. How the Irish Became Americans? Twayne
Publishers, Inc., 1973.
- Osborne, Thomas. “The Ordinariness of the Archive.” History of the
Human Sciences, vol.12, no. 2, 1999, pp. 51-64.
- Rhodes, Leara. The Ethnic Press: Shaping the American Dream. Peter
Lang, 2010.
- Roediger, David R. Working toward Whiteness: How America’s
Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis
Island to the Suburbs. Basic, 2006.
- Wood, Forrest G. Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation
and Reconstruction. University of California Press, 1970.