Originally posted by red g jacks
... care to elaborate? like i said im not that familiar... "the american wake" is a term i've never heard. welcome to the results of 21 century urban american public school
lol np. It's not as if we do much American history ourselves.
Even as bad as things were in Ireland, the time before one left for America was called the American Wake. Now, it didn't start off during the famine, but by the time of it, it was called as such because leaving to go the states was considered almost as bad as a death, to the extent that it was a kind of death itself.
People going to America was seen not as a great opportunity, but a necessity to feed hungry families due to what England/Cromwell were doing in Ireland at the time. By the time the famine came around, the Irish had to leave or else face death due to how bad it got.
When they actually arrived in America, they were abused, mistreated and exploited by the locals. I'm sure not every American was terrible to the Irish, nor were all Irish emigrations to America a disaster. But a very, very large number were. It isn't like nowadays where countries like Australia or Canada are all "we could do with some skilled workers, you should come over" (though Australia is pulling back on it).
Job listings commonly said "No Irish need apply", and a lot of immigrants were forced to work on the railroads with, iirc the Chinese. The kind of railroads that black slaves were apparently too valuable to be risked on. It wasn't exactly a party.
Any American knows today that the relationship with Ireland goes back a long way. For the most part nowadays it's a good relationship (bar the trouble with Shannon). But to call it mutually beneficial when, for a lot of these people, their choices were basically death or extreme poverty slash slavery, doesn't seem accurate to me.
I didn't mean to rant. My bad.
