Twenty Irish mine workers were hanged in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania in the 1870s, convicted of a series of murders organized under the cover of a secret society called the Molly Maguires. Hostile contemporaries described the Molly Maguires as inherently savage Irish immigrants who had imported a violent conspiratorial organization into industrial America. Challenges to this nativist myth produced a counter-myth casting the Molly Maguires as innocent victims of economic, religious, or ethnic oppression. Neither interpretation makes historical sense.
In October 2023, Oxford University Press published a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Kevin Kenny’s Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. Who were the Molly Maguires, what did they do, and why did they do it? Why did contemporaries describe them in such hostile ways? And what does the subject tell us about the history of immigration and labor in the United States?
Dr. Kevin Kenny is Glucksman Professor of History at New York University. He teaches and writes about American immigration and global migration. As well as Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, he is the author of Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (2009), Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (2013), and The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2023).