How The Irish Became White Av Noel Ignatiev

<P><STRONG>''¿from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called ¿path breaking,¿ ¿seminal,¿ ¿essential,¿ a ¿must read.¿ <EM>How the Irish Became White</EM> is such a study.''</STRONG> John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst<BR></P><P>The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country ¿ a land of opportunity ¿ they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person¿s skin. Noel Ignatiev¿s 1995 book ¿ the first published work of one of America¿s leading and most controversial historians ¿ tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists.