“What are the Irish Catholics Fighting for?”: The Pilot’s Creation of An Alternative Archive to American Nativist Amnesia During the Civil War*

Authors : Gamze KATI GÜMÜŞ

Pages : 85-109

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Publication Date : 2020-05-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :An institution with its very own systems of remembering, forgetting, memorizing and presenting, the Boston Pilot, an Irish ethnic newspaper, directly and indirectly aimed to shape an identity for the Irish community in the United States. Parallel to many alternative systems of archiving, the Pilot distrusted the archive of the hegemonic other and created an archival organization to avoid societal and historical amnesia. In this sense, the series of “Records of IrishAmerican Patriotism” written by Michael Hennessy is an important asset for the paper as the series documents the heroic acts of the Irish Brigade and Irish American soldiers, and creates an alternative archive of its own together with the news and editorials published in the Pilot. Additionally, the Pilot’s racially motivated lexicon over the course of the Civil War will be analyzed to understand further how this alternative archive influenced its readers and their perception of African Americans.
Keywords : The Boston Pilot, Archive, Michael Hennessy, Whiteness, Nationalism, Irish Americans