High School Student Proves “No Irish Need Apply” Signs Existed
longislandwins.com
longislandwins.com
If this is a remotely accurate characterization, it baffles me that Jensen's work would have found a home in a journal or that he would have felt comfortable expressing those views in public. How profoundly emotional and unscientific (not to mention vile and insulting)
Such a claim is extremely complicated (defying occam's razor) and implies some sort of conspiracy that is at the very least questionable without sound proof. The idea that such claims would have not been aggressively debunked in the past is pretty questionable, as well. The seemingly trivial task of finding evidence to support the existence of these ads makes me wonder if Jensen did any research at all. Was he just grinding his racist axe, and did the scientific community give him a pass on it because they didn't care?
Edit: "that" -> "than".
Oh, no. Don't tell me this is going to be trending now.
Professor Jensen should be ashamed of himself for failing to conduct even the most trivial searches for this information.
The fact that he accepts the ads were real makes his claim that Irish were delusionally propagating a myth of oppression even harder to understand.
Fried just took the additional initiative of going directly to the newspaper ads, which are primary sources indicating discrimination, rather than the secondary sources of newspaper articles talking about the discrimination.
Not really. The one thing he's correct about is that, if NINA was a real and widespread phenomenon, it would show up in certain pieces of documentation of the era -- newspaper want ads, for example (we actually have fairly large archives from the relevant era; it's not like something from thousands of years ago where it's plausible that no documentation would have survived.) His problem was that he didn't look deeply enough, and once he drew the initial wrong conclusion, he invented a totally wrong theory to explain it.
True. I think what he assumed was that it would show in other types of documents (like discrimination lawsuits, news showing revolt of the Irish against this policy, etc)
But I suspect this was very common and accepted, unfortunately.
My reading is the opposite. He started with a theory and then did a shallow search to bolster his pre-conceived theory, ignoring or discounting any findings that didn't fit.
I wonder if the big reason for these completely different results in the underlying counting experiment is that the later research was done after ocr had improved so much that the searches had very different samples of the papers.
He's certainly not doing himself any favors with this condescending appeal to authority. In general, the exchange between Jensen and Fried is a perfect example of how to handle a nasty person with grace.
I wouldn't put it past the fact that the high schooler probably knows how to google better than the "phd"
"Jensen attracted a lot of attention because he did not just write that the NINA signs did not exist, he said the Irish were and are delusional, that in order to sustain a sense of victimhood they had manufactured a group-wide lie of discriminatory anti-Irish ads and signs"
Oh wow, lovely lad
Another edit: "Wanted - A Middle Aged protestant woman... no Irish need apply" I think it would be hard to find an Irish Protestant at that time, no?
Belfast (and the whole of Ulster) was full of them.
Poverty throughout the counties was common and they wanted to find a new and better life just as much as their Roman Catholic neighbours did.
They were Irish, but the unionists agreed (along with Great Britain) that Ireland should be ruled by the King and be under British rule, and subsequently they all adopt the "British" sect of Christianity (Anglicanism).
The relationship between Unionism and Protestantism and Nationalism and Catholicism was and still is much more grey than many realise. The current situation with Northern Ireland makes this appear much more dry-cut than it actually is because NI was set up on sectarian grounds. However, historically many, in fact the majority, of the prime movers in Irish nationalism have been from Anglican backgrounds that would naively be associated with Unionism.
Also, Irish Nationalism was contrary to Unionism, but a good number of prominent Nationalists had Monarchist tendencies too, such as the founder and leader of the original Sinn Fein, Arthur Griffith[1]. Republicanism was something that came out of the more militant strains of Nationalism, as represented by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who infiltrated Sinn Fein to use it as a vehicle for their own aims.
Moreover, the vast majority of Irish Protestants have been Presbyterian, not Anglican. Anglicanism was the church of the Establishment, not the common people. Presbyterians, being Nonconformist, were subject to many of the discriminatory practices of the various penal laws, just as Catholics were, because they weren't Anglicans, albeit not to quite the same extent. Anglicanism was historically the church of the upper classes and parts of the middle class.
[1] Griffith wasn't technically what you'd call a Monarchist, but he wasn't a Republican either. He supported the idea of an independent Ireland under a dual monarchy with the United Kingdom.
The question was "Did they [Irish Protestants] really consider themselves "Irish", though?" and the answer is "yes".
> Moreover, the vast majority of Irish Protestants have been Presbyterian, not Anglican.
The Church of Ireland is (and has been in recent history) the second largest Christian "sect" (as I put it earlier) in Ireland after Roman Catholicism. The Church of Ireland follows Anglicanism.
Of course are many many complications to the entire subject but that wasn't the original question, I was referring to the national identification of the Protestant islanders during the time frame of Jensen's claims.
Yes, you're correct in that the CofI is slightly bigger than the Presbyterian churches. However, that's not my main point. What I was disagreeing with was your conflation of Unionism and Anglicanism, which is entirely incorrect.
Protestants in what is now Northern Ireland could consider themselves eg, 'Ulster Scots'
"Ulster Scots refers to (largely) Presbyterian descendants of Scottish planters who emigrated to the US."
Which implied otherwise.
She'll go places.
How on Earth did anyone take this man seriously? Is he a visitor from an alternate universe where segregation never happened?
Probably not a particularly important mystery, but weird.
If this [exodus] goes on, as it is likely to go on…the United States will become very Irish….So an Ireland there will still be, but on a colossal scale, and in a new world. We must gird our loins to encounter the Nemesis of seven centuries’ misgovernment. To the end of time a hundred million spread over the largest havitable area in the world, and, confronting us everywhere by sea and land, will remember that their forefathers paid tithe to the Protestant clergy, rent to absentee landlords, and a forced obedience to the laws which these had made. (The Times, quoted in The Nation, May 1860)
It's a fascinating (also frustrating) phenomenom.
While it says nothing of the historical accuracy, the exchange between the two historians, quoted in the text, makes me lean much more in favor of the researcher behind the new work.
Ouch. That's a serious burn.
I wonder if people in another 100 years will think it's wrong to discriminate against people because of who their parents were.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/04/24/us/ap-us-border-p...
I assume you're talking about the H-1B visas, etc?
For attribution purposes, the image is associated with an enlightening write-up, but that particular image isn't in the actual article - http://mix97-3.com/youre-never-too-old-for-a-spring-break-le...
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/australian-bricklayer-emplo...
Totally irrelevant to the conversation other than perhaps the myths/realities/realities that become myths/myths that become realities perhaps traverse time.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=irish+need+not+ap...
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:23zU9KH...
Oh really? Australia, 1862:
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/115763711?searchTerm...
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%22no+irish%22+window+...
Here's a reddit thread on the issue
https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/3erkxv/nina_no_i...