Jenkins’ book is an interdisciplinary, comparative study of Irish immigration to North America focusing on two cities on the Great Lakes fewer than 100 miles apart—Buffalo, New York, and Toronto, Canada—both of which served as “gateways” to the West but individually provided vastly different conditions for Irish immigrants. Jenkins describes the changes in Irish experience between 1866, when the Canadian branch of the Fenian Brotherhood—a group dedicated to the independence of Ireland from Britain—raided Ridgeway, Ontario, and 1916, the year of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland.
Jenkins’ geographical skills highlight some of the similarities between the Irish in Toronto and Buffalo. Scouring city directories and censuses, he provides valuable maps outlining the primary areas of Irish settlement and innovative diagrams highlighting Irish intergenerational residential mobility between 1880 and 1910. Irish Catholic migrants in both cities formed their own ethnic neighborhoods close to their workplaces and centred on their churches. There...