Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126
Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127
David Sim’s desire is to speak into American foreign policy and politics the ideals of Irish nationalism. Essentially, Irish Americans have gotten plenty of historical focus by American scholars in social and political arenas within America. Scholars cover the Irish impact upon cities, political machines, urban living, and the railroad extensively. Sim wants to discuss the less understood argument of Irish nationalism and its effect upon American foreign policy decisions and structures. Throughout the nineteenth century the Irish struggles and frustrations at home against British control spread with the diaspora of Irish immigrants coming to America. Sim argues that these feeling of nationalism were always strong to the Irish and as they established their communities in America, these feelings of pride and hope for a free Ireland continued. Many Irish hoped that America would provided the necessary political power and leverage to force the British into recognition of an Irish nation. Sim argues that through their outspoken rhetoric in America and even physical action of the Fenians or other expatriates traveling to Ireland under questionable motives, the Americans were forced to deal with problems of citizenship and protections granted overseas. In the end, the Irish failed in their bid for change, but Sim argues that it was their powerful push and the presence of American citizens in jails overseas that forced the United States to take strong foreign policy stances.
This work connects well with Gould’s arguments about early American desires for recognition as a nation. Queenlove35 summarized Gould well when she stated that Americans wanted to be respected and allowed a “place at the globalizing nations grown-ups table.” Ireland is seeking the same recognition after receiving independence from the British dominion and believe that it is the liberty and republican loving Americans who can help them get there. There are overtones that even as the Americans struggle with the “Irish question” and issues of expatriates in prison that they are still not being fully respected by the former parent country. American diplomats navigate difficult legal understandings between protections of foreign citizens as the British attempt to silence continued Irish protest. Much of the failure of the Irish nationalistic overtures might be the ever shifting relationship between Britain and her former colonial child. As Americans and British grow closer at turn of the century and into World War I, the Irish nationalistic pressure subsides from American foreign policy.