Canada And The Great Irish Famine

In the summer of 1847, over four hundred ships arrived in the Gulf of St Lawrence, carrying Irish men, women, and children who were fleeing the starvation and misery of the Great Potato Famine. Tens of thousands of famine refugees rebuilt their lives in different parts of Canada, in places urban and rural, Anglophone and Francophone. Though still a young province within the British Empire, Canada would be marked permanently and in significant ways by this mass migration. Canada and the Great Irish Famine examines how people confronted, experienced, and remembered the famine migration. Essays consider the transatlantic voyage, the collection of donations and organization of aid, the challenges encountered by the cities of Quebec, Saint John, Montreal, Toronto, Kingston, and Hamilton and their public debates over the impact of so many new arrivals, the accompanying problems of disease, destitution, mental illness, death, and burial, the stories of orphaned children, and expressions of...