Full bibliography

This article summarizes the accepted view of the Irish in America, notably that they have always been a "city people." The author then surveys the sources of data on which the agreed interpretation is based. He demonstrates that for the crucial years of the Irish-American experience, the period 1815-75: (l) that the data base certainly is inadequate to prove the '"city people" hypothesis and (2) he speculates (and his speculations are clearly labelled as such) that a more realistic interpretation of the ambiguous data is that the Irish indeed were not a city people. The importance of this argument for historians of social class in North America is that it implies that Irish immigrants and their off-spring cannot necessarily be assumed to have formed a part of the urban working class.