Irish Archives | What It Means to Be American

How Irish American Athletes Slugged Their Way to Respectability

Sportsmen with Roots in the Emerald Isle Reshaped the Image of the Shantytown Ruffian

By James Silas Rogers
May 19, 2017

In his 1888 book The Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport, a high-minded treatise on the ennobling effect of sports, the journalist, poet, and Irish exile John Boyle O’Reilly wrote that “there is no branch of athletics in which Irishmen, or the sons of Irishmen, do not hold first place in all the world.” The boast was closer to true than many would realize. By the turn of the 20th century, America’s professional sports were bursting at the seams with …

How Living Abroad Brought Me Closer to Home

As a Californian With Korean-Irish Roots, I Felt More Like a Global Citizen—Until I Lived Outside the U.S.

By Victoria Namkung
June 2, 2015

In the summer of 1997, days after my 20th birthday, I was making my first international trip alone. I was going to Kuala Lumpur for the summer to intern at a men’s lifestyle magazine that published in English.

Halfway through the connecting flight from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, I was handed a landing card from the flight attendant and began filling out my passport details. Under nationality, I wrote Korean and Irish. After all, anytime someone at college in Santa …

At an Irish-American Funeral Home, I Found My Chinese Roots

Just Blocks Away From the Blarney Stone Pub, Buddhist Nuns Helped My Family Lay My Grandmother to Rest in San Francisco

By Jia-Rui Cook
September 22, 2014

In a room filled with wreaths bearing Chinese characters on broad ribbons, two Buddhist nuns in embroidered yellow robes started chanting and striking bells. One by one, members of my family, each with a black band tied around an arm, approached my grandmother’s casket. Each of us held a smoldering joss stick between prayer hands and bowed three times in respect.

Explore : Irish