A Letter Home - Irish Emigrant Correspondence from North America, 1818–1972

Before phones, email & video calls, letters connected Irish emigrants with home. Join historian Breandán Mac Suibhne to explore their lives. ********** We are delighted to welcome back Prof. Breandán Mac Suibhne to Maigh Cuilinn for a special talk, A Letter Home: Irish Emigrant Correspondence from North America, 1818–1972, drawn from the IMIRCE Collection. Fáilte mhór roimh an Ollamh Breandán Mac Suibhne ar ais go Maigh Cuilinn, ag caint faoi litreacha agus scéalta na n-eisimirceach ón mbailiúchán IMIRCE. ********** Before email became widely used in the closing years of the twentieth century, and long before Facebook, FaceTime, WhatsApp and Zoom transformed communication in the twenty-first, Irish emigrants in North America had far fewer ways of keeping in touch with home. The telephone offered one possibility, at least in theory. Invented in the late nineteenth century, its use expanded rapidly across the United States between the First and Second World Wars. But in Ireland, until the 1980s, ‘home phones’ were as rare as hen’s teeth. And so here, over the several centuries of our leave-takings to America, the primary mode of communication with home was the letter. Historian Breandán Mac Suibhne of the University of Galway asks what these letters tell of emigrants’ own understanding of the experience of migration. ********** The talk will be followed by refreshments and a conversation sharing local memories of letters and parcels from America. Mac Suibhne has contributed an introduction to A Letter Home, an anthology of over sixty emigrant letters compiled by Kerby A. Miller, which is to be published by Gill on 24 September. Among his other recent publications is, as editor with Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, Ag Cur chun Fónaimh (2023), a collection of essays on Údarás na Gaeltachta.