The Irish in America: Long Journey Home.

• Author: Rothenberg, Robert S.

As the 20th century winds to an end, most Americans give little thought to the Irish among them as a separate heritage except during the annual St. Patrick's Day parades. Mostly lost is the painful struggle of a frequently reviled people to carve a foothold in a new country. This exhaustive documentary traces their fierce battle from tragedy to triumph through archival pictures and film and the testimony of scholars, politicians, authors, and common people, both in Ireland and the U.S.

The Irish migration began with Protestants from the North in pre-Revolutionary War days, many of them indentured servants or transported felons, who helped open the frontiers, building the new nation's roads and canals. The major movement of population occurred following Ireland's Great Famine, beginning in 1845. Driven from their land by a combination of a blight that decimated the potato crop and English landlords' ruthless policies, about 1,500,000 predominantly Catholic Irish emigrated from their native country, mostly to America. A million others were not as lucky, perishing from starvation and disease.

The U.S. provided far from a hospitable welcome, the "famine Irish" regarded as almost sub-human, without even the economic value that black slaves commanded. Virtually everything the Irish would achieve over the next half-century or so they would have to fight for, often with their fists and other weapons. They served in disproportionate numbers on both sides during the Civil War, then spread out across the new nation, building its railroads and mining the coal that propelled them. From the bloody labor struggles of the Pennsylvania coal mines...