I have spent dozens of pleasant hours with this book, and most historians of pre-Famine Ireland and of the United States in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries will probably enjoy it as well. The collection of memorable characters and the mass of heterogeneous facts give a rich sense of a signal period in Irish and American history. This is an essential item for most university libraries. It will be useful for undergraduates who need easy access to primary sources, and in postgraduate seminars it will serve as an example of how to interpret and place into context pieces of correspondence produced by seemingly everyday persons. Overall, the book is an object lesson in how to pay attention to historical detail.

Although there are several authors listed on the title page, the book belongs to Kerby Miller, and the Library of Congress is correct in cataloging it as “written and edited by Kerby A. Miller … et al.” Miller's assistants included Arnold Schrier, emeritus professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. Schrier published in 1958 Ireland and the Irish Question, a seminal work not only in Irish, but in U.S. history. Miller was aided in linguistic matters by Bruce Boling, an associate professor and librarian at the University of New Mexico. Also aiding Miller was David Noel Doyle, professor of modern history at University College, Dublin, an author of several provocative and sometimes fascinatingly cabalistic books about American colonial history. The most important of Miller's helpers, Liam Kennedy, the distinguished economic historian from Queen's University Belfast, is not mentioned on the title page, but, as I will suggest later, he was joint author of an appendix to the book that is actually the volume's most important contribution to future scholarship.

One emphasizes that, despite his assistants’ help, this is Miller's book because it is an implicit and completely satisfactory palinode for the failings of Miller's earlier Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1985). As I wrote at the time, “[Miller’s] publisher has not found room for a bibliography of printed sources; he has been allowed only one footnote for each paragraph, with the result that the source of quotations is not adequately specified and it is often difficult, indeed impossible, to determine in which of a score of books and letters mentioned in each footnote a particular fact is to be found” (Canadian Historical Review 67 [September 1986]: 408). More important and more pointedly, David Fitzpatrick noted that “Miller's frequent omission of contextual detail (beyond the bare name of sender and date) debases his citations of correspondence from historical evidence to mere illustration; while the brevity of his quotations strips these illustrations of nuance” (Reviews in American History 15 [June 1987]: 274).

These earlier comments are here germane because criticisms of this sort manifestly determined the character of the present volume. Put simply, this time Miller decided to do things right, and so he has. The task was made easier for him because Fitzpatrick, now professor of history at Trinity College, Dublin, laid down the tramlines and set the quality standard for studies of emigrant correspondence in his magisterial Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (1994). By emulating Fitzpatrick, Miller could not fail to produce a rigorous, contextualized, and nuanced compilation of emigrant letters.

The present book consists of ninety-eight distinct documents, comprising sixty-eight text segments. Unlike Fitzpatrick's volume, Miller's material does not fall nicely into a narrative pattern, but that is more a result of the fragmented nature of early American history than of any failing on the editor's part. Each text segment is placed in context. Most important, each document is fully annotated. And, miracle upon miracle, the annotations are at the foot of each page. Simply reading the notes is a joy. It is like playing a giant game of Irish and early American “Trivia.” One learns tons of facts, has disagreements with some of the notes, laughs occasionally at the way migrants played with the meaning of words, and, generally, has a good time. There is no new interpretation of Irish or early U.S. history implied in this volume—despite its considerable size, the book is modest in its ambitions—so one can simply read the migrant letters with pleasure and not worry about any historical agenda.

However, the potential reader should be aware that this is an “American” book, in the imperial sense of the word. The Land of Canaan that the righteous spied out is virtually limited to the area of the original Thirteen Colonies and their hinterlands. The rest of what is known as “America” is erased. Thus, the book presents only one letter dealing with what later became the Dominion of Canada. This is strange, as the first strong settlement in North America of Irish persons was in Newfoundland: perhaps they never wrote home. More curious still is the assertion that “Prior to 1815 very few Irish men and women migrated to mainland Canada, and only a handful of unrepresentative letters survive” (vii). Leaving aside the question of what “mainland Canada” might possibly mean—Canada minus Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton Island, the Island of Montreal, and Newfoundland?—it is preposterous to assert that few Irish migrants came to what later became British North America before 1815. Thousands did. They were ordinary people, not chiefly an elite, and they left letters, good ones. These people were called “Loyalists” and “Late Loyalists,” and they had been driven out of the thirteen colonies by political persecution, real or perceived. They did not stop being Irish migrants just because they had been beaten up in the colonies to the south. And they left massive amounts of correspondence, some of it sent back to old friends in the (now) United States, and a good deal to British officials in pursuit of compensation claims. Regretfully, one must add that a similar imperialistic use of “American” limits the material on the West Indies to one letter sequence. In fact, in the 1660s, when this volume begins, “America” as often referred to the West Indies as it did to mainland North America.

Earlier, I noted that Kennedy is not listed as a coauthor, and that certainly is his prerogative. However, the most consequential portion of Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan is an appendix he and Miller jointly present entitled “Irish Migration and Demography, 1659–1831” (656–78). These admirably efficient few pages will be of immense importance to historians of the British Isles in general, not simply Ireland. The appendix represents a synopsis of progress that Kennedy and Miller have made thus far on a project they began in the mid-1980s: a reconstruction of the sources for Irish religious demography from 1659 to 1926. The material from the Restoration to the first real Irish census (1831) is scant, but Kennedy and Miller are forming a compendium of fugitive demographic material that has long been ignored. This may well revolutionize both the accepted views of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonization of Ireland and of the migration from Ireland. That appendix alone is worth the price of this entire hefty volume.