"During the first half of the nineteenth century an unprecedented number of peasants left their European homelands, crossed the Atlantic, and settled in North America. These people came from various parts of western Europe, but in all this massive flow the southern Irish were the largest ethnic or cultural group. Celtic and Catholic, they were largely a rural, pre-industrial people. Although the vast majority of the Southern Irish opted for city life in North America, many settled in rural areas, particularly in eastern Canada or British North America as it was then called. While something of the community of Irish life may have been more readily reproduced in an urban setting than it was in the relative isolation of the North American farm lot, the immigrants continued their age-old occupation of the farm and could transfer and adapt there a wider range of the material folk culture and settlement morphology of their homeland."  - from the preface

219pp including index