The moment is propitious for the appearance of a volume like this one: The emergence of the field of global history, when combined with a new skepticism about the doctrine of American historical exceptionalism, provides an opportunity to break the historiography of the Irish diaspora out of the spancel of American parochialism. Overwhelmingly (especially in U.S. universities), the story of Irish migration has been taken exclusively to mean the road to America because the rest does not much count. At present, the potential of cross-national comparisons of Irish migration, however, is obvious: Canada and Australia in particular provide rich comparative databases, in many ways superior to that of the United States (the fact that the U.S. census does not collect data on religion makes most of the generalizations about this central component of Irish American migrant culture wobbly at best). Moreover, in larger perspective, the time has come to situate...

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