Mining Irish-American Lives focuses on the importance and influence of the Irish within the mining frontier of the American West. Scholarship of the West has largely ignored the complicated lives of the Irish people in mining towns, whose life details are often kept to a bare minimum. This book uses individual stories and the histories of different communities—Randsburg, California; Virginia City, Nevada; Leadville, Colorado; Butte, Montana; Idaho’s Silver Valley; and the Comstock Lode, for example—to explore Irish and Irish-American lives.
Historian Alan J. M. Noonan uses a range of previously overlooked sources, including collections of emigrant letters, hospital logbooks, private detective reports, and internment records, to tell the stories of Irish men and women who emigrated to mining towns to search for opportunity. Noonan details the periods, the places, and the experiences over multiple generations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He carefully examines their encounters with nativists, other ethnic groups, and mining companies to highlight the contested emergence of a hyphenated Irish-American identity.
Alan J. M. Noonan, Ph.D. is an award-winning historian and writer. He is Cork City Libraries’ Historian-in-Residence since 2022. He is the author of Mining Irish-American Lives: Western Communities from 1849 to 1920, published in late 2022 by the University Press of Colorado. The book was awarded The McGowan Prize for Distinguished Book in Irish American History 2023 by the Irish American Cultural Institute.