Upcoming Events

Sunday February 23, 2025 at 12pm noon on Zoom

David Emmons on History’s Erratics

The ILHS is very pleased to present a talk by the preeminent historian of the Irish in the West, Professor David Emmons.   Professor Emmons will talk about his provocative new volume, History’s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870-1930 on Sunday, February 23, 12m noon PST by Zoom.  

As Ice Age glaciers left behind erratics, so the external forces of history tumbled the Irish into America. Existing both out of time and out of space, a diverse range of these Roman-Catholic immigrants saw their new country in a much different way than did the Protestants who settled and claimed it. These erratics chose backward looking tradition and independence over assimilation and embraced a quintessentially Irish form of subversiveness that arose from their culture, faith, and working-class outlook. David M. Emmons draws on decades of research and thought to plumb the mismatch of values between Protestant Americans hostile to Roman Catholicism and the Catholic Irish strangers among them. Joining ethnicity and faith to social class, Emmons explores the unique form of dissidence that arose when Catholic Irish workers and their sympathizers rejected the beliefs and symbols of American capitalism.

A vibrant and original tour de force, History’s Erratics explores the ancestral roots of Irish nonconformity and defiance in America.

Purchase the book here: https://a.co/d/3BlxzKi

David M. Emmons is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Montana. His books include The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 and Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845–1910.

Emmons earned his Ph.D. in 1969 from the University of Colorado-Boulder where he studied under the eminent Western historian (from Kremlin, Montana) Robert G. Athearn. After one year at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, he joined the faculty of the History Department at The University of Montana in 1967.

Zoom link here:

Time: Sunday Feb 23, 2025 12:00 PM noon Pacific Time

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85470420065

Meeting ID: 854 7042 0065