Irish Catholics.

Most Irish immigrants who came to the United States in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were Scots-Irish Protestants, many of whom possessed education, skills, and some capital. As the population soared in southern and western Ireland and small holdings became increasingly subdivided, by the 1830s more Irish Catholics immigrated to the United States. Although these young men and women who traveled across the Atlantic may have hoped to become landowning farmers, most of them found work as day laborers and domestic servants. As a result of the great potato famine of the late 1840s 1.5 million people left Ireland for the United States; most were destitute farmers, cottiers, and laborers, and about half of them arrived in family groups including children. Famine immigrants were mostly Catholic, and one-fourth to one-third were Gaelic-speaking; unaccustomed to an urban industrial society, they struggled to survive in Northeastern cities. About...