Angela F. Murphy. American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal. (Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2010. Pp. xiii, 286. $45.00

This book is a welcome intervention into studies of mid-nineteenth-century Irish American transatlantic politics, examining the transnational movement for repeal of the Act of Union of 1800, which abolished the Irish parliament in Dublin and instituted direct rule from Westminster. Specifically, it questions the effects of Irish and Irish American engagement with perhaps the most significant of nineteenth-century reform movements, antislavery, on the political standing, efficacy, moral authority, and sustainability of the repeal movement in the period up until the death of Daniel O'Connell in 1847.

The book steers a course different from those discussions of Irish America stressing nineteenth-century patterns of labor, migration, and racial formation in the United States that have emerged in the years since the publication of David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991). Rather...