Most Irish were farmers who worked tiny plots of land, paying stiff rents to British landlords and living in primitive mud and stone huts.īy 1844, Ireland’s population had swelled to 8.4 million, most of whom had lives built around potatoes. Ireland had virtually no significant manufacturing sector. The only European country controlled by another country, it had been ruled by Great Britain for many centuries. Before the famine began, Ireland was already a desperately poor country. The hsitory of Irish immigration to the United States goes back well before the nineteenth century, but the Great Irish Famine that began during the late 1840’s brought the greatest number of Irish immigrants to America. Most of the immigrants settled in the large urban centers of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. immigration history, Ireland’s great potato famine induced a massive wave of Irish emigration to Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, where Irish immigrants quickly became the nation’s second-largest ethnic group. Significance: One of the single-most influential events in U.S. The Event: Devastating potato blight that caused mass starvation
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