Irish American transnational revolutionaries: The Fenian invasion of Canada, 1866

This project aims to consider the Irish-American experience with a specific focus on the event known as the "Fenian invasion of Canada." I will show that this relatively little known and often derided episode is of greater importance to America's past than historians have previously allowed. My research will appraise the presence and actions of a particular set of Irish immigrants in the United States at a pivotal time in America's past, and examine how they interject with the developing American record in regard to identity and the nation state, in a time of turmoil and change during and following the U.S. Civil War. The main focus will be an account and interpretation of the activities that culminated in the 1866 Fenian Brotherhood's raids into British North America, with many of the ordinary Fenian members who were involved having just fought in the American Civil War.;The Fenian invasion of Canada speaks to a seminal transnational event inextricably tied to American global history and, indeed, U.S. imperial competition in the North Atlantic. The Fenian Brotherhood's determination to invade Canada also raises interesting ideas about the formation of Irish-American ethnicity, which concomitantly intersects with the debate over theories of whiteness regarding an Irish-American race consciousness during the American Civil War period. This exploration of the Fenian invasion of Canada, then, offers an innovative look at a forgotten past which challenges previous conceptions of nationally corralled American history, Irish immigrant assimilation, the American Civil War in a global context, and the complex design of a specifically Irish American ethnic identity.