Virtual Lecture – Making Sense of the Molly Maguires

Twenty Irishmen were hanged in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania in the late 1870s, convicted of a series of sixteen killings allegedly committed under the cover of a secret society called the Molly Maguires. Hostile contemporaries described the Molly Maguires as inherently savage Irish immigrants who imported a violent conspiratorial organization that had no place in industrial America. Challenges to this nativist myth produced a counter-myth transposing the category of evil from the immigrants to their exploiters, casting the Irish as innocent victims of economic, religious, or ethnic oppression. Neither interpretation makes historical sense. The Molly Maguires were not depraved killers, but neither were they figments of the nativist or anti-labor imagination. They never existed as the conspiracy imagined by their enemies, but they did use violence to combat exploitation. Who were the Molly Maguires, what did they do, and why did they do it? Why did contemporaries describe them in such luridly hostile ways? And what do their actions tell us about transatlantic protest and class conflict in the nineteenth century?

About the Speaker: Kevin Kenny is Glucksman Professor of History at New York University. His books include Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998; 25th anniversary edition, 2023), The American Irish: A History (2000), Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (2009), Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (2013), and most recently, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2023), which won the James A. Rawley Prize and the Theodore Saloutos Award. A Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians, Professor Kenny served as President of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society from 2021 to 2024.

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Presentation is via Zoom, and will be recorded and available for 7 days for all registered participants. We will email out a Zoom link the day of the presentation, and email a link to the recording within 24 hours. Note: the Zoom link emailed out the day of the presentation only takes you to the live presentation; the link emailed out the day after will contain the recorded version.

This presentation is made possible by the generous support of The Haverford Trust Company.