As you may have seen, next week we will be making our topic focus on the Irish Famine available. We have a number of contributions and I hope you will enjoy it, but I wanted to share one tiny nugget I have dragged up in the course of my research because it struck me as so amazing and you can see it below:

Greater New York's Italian population in the 1890's equaled [sic] that of Naples; its German population equaled [sic] that of Hamburg. Twice as many Irish lived in New York as in Dublin. The flood of arrivals alarmed many nativeborn Americans concerned, as one of them confessed in the 1890's, "at the prospect of adding enormously to the burden of the municipal governments in the large cities, already almost breaking down through corruption and inefficiency." And yet the real surge of immigration had hardly begun.

The United States: The History Of A Republic, Second Edition, by Richard Hofstadter, William Miller, Daniel Aaron. © Copyright 1957, 1967 by Prentice-Hall, Inc

The emphasis is my own, what a startling fact!

Eoin