Omnia Hibernica: How Acis Brought Irish Studies to the Academy (American Conference of Irish Studies‪)‬

CHAPTER 1 ORIGINS, BEGINNINGS, DEFINITIONS IN ANY HISTORY OF IRISH AMERICANA, 1961 leaps out as an annus mirabilis. On January 20 of that year, the United States inaugurated as president the child of immigrants from Wexford and Cork. Not just someone whose family had emigrated from Ireland, like Andrew Jackson or William McKinley, but an offspring of the formerly oppressed native stock. John F. Kennedy, the second son of a millionaire ambassador to the Court of St. James, walked and talked like a Boston Brahmin. But he wanted all citizens to know that he was a fior-ghael, a true Irishman. The Kennedy ascendancy did not change social history' as much as it announced subterranean transformations that were already taking place. Two centuries of social experience that gave us such colloquialism as "thick Mick," "paddy wagon" and "old biddy," had pretty well come to a close. For a new generation Irishness was not a burden but a choice.