This book describes the flowering of the Irish American community and the 1890s growth of a Gaelic public sphere in Philadelphia, a movement inspired by the cultural awakening in native Ireland, transplanted and acted upon in Philadelphia’s robust Irish community. The Philadelphia Irish embraced this export of cultural nationalism, reveled in Gaelic symbols, and endorsed the Gaelic language, political nationalism, Celtic paramilitarism, Gaelic sport, and a broad ethnic culture.

Using Jurgen Habermas’s concept of a public sphere, the author reveals how the Irish constructed a plebian “counter” public of Gaelic meaning through various mechanisms of communication, the ethnic press, the meeting rooms of Irish societies, the consumption of circulating pamphlets, oratory, songs, ballads, poems, and conversation.

Settled in working class neighborhoods of vast spatial separation in an industrial city, the Irish resisted a parochialism identified with neighborhood and instead extended themselves to construct a vibrant, culturally engaged network of Irish rebirth in Philadelphia, a public of Gaelic meaning.

"Mullan is to be commended for his very impressive original study of Irish Philadelphia and the way that the people who migrated there from Ireland drew from their past to build their present. I strongly believe that readers will profit from his insights." - author of Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910

"?In this path-breaking work, Michael Mullan demonstrates the importance of studying the many links between the Irish American community in 1890s Philadelphia and the Irish cultural revival in Ireland. Mullan gives us a novel perspective with the concept of a Gaelic public sphere resulting from the meeting between the American milieu and the Irish roots. This is a compelling study, which should be required reading for all those who wish to understand how to write innovatively transnational cultural history." - Author of Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy

"Mullan is to be commended for his very impressive original study of Irish Philadelphia and the way that the people who migrated there from Ireland drew from their past to build their present. I strongly believe that readers will profit from his insights." - author of Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910

"In this path-breaking work, Michael Mullan demonstrates the importance of studying the many links between the Irish American community in 1890s Philadelphia and the Irish cultural revival in Ireland. Mullan gives us a novel perspective with the concept of a Gaelic public sphere resulting from the meeting between the American milieu and the Irish roots. This is a compelling study, which should be required reading for all those who wish to understand how to write innovatively transnational cultural history." - Author of Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy