The Sons of Molly Maguire

The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor War

MARK BULIK

384 pages, 8 b/w illustrations

9781531502959, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £16.99

[Hardback editions available: 9780823262236] eBook Available

MARCH

History | Labor Studies

(continued on back flap)

“The Sons of Molly Maguire is an engaging and enlightening work of historical research and scholarship. As well as bringing into focus the Mollies’ role in giving America its first taste of class warfare, Bulik’s incisive and original explorations sweep aside myths, legends, half-truths, and untruths. He significantly deepens our understanding of these flesh-and-blood laborers, who they were, where they came from, and how their struggle resonated through the labor movement in the United States. Thoughtful, insightful, and unfailing fair, The Sons of Molly Maguire is history at its best.”

—PETER QUINN, AUTHOR OF LOOKING FOR JIMMY: A SEARCH FOR IRISH AMERICA

“With deft writing and impressive research, Mark Bulik offers a new explanation for a conflict that shook the very foundations of post–Civil War America. The Molly Maguires were at the center of America’s first great labor war, but as Bulik shows, the first shots of that war were fired not in northeastern Pennsylvania but in the fields and villages of Ireland.”

—TERRY GOLWAY, AUTHOR OF MACHINE MADE: TAMMANY HALL AND THE CREATION OF MODERN AMERICAN POLITICS

“The Sons of Molly Maguire is a superb work of scholarship. Focused on origins, this work situates the Irish emergence and American persistence of the Molly Maguires in all of their considerable complexity, while likewise ably revealing not only the crucial developments of the 1870s that have embedded the Mollies in American memory but also the factors contributing to the Mollies’ continuing legacy extending into the present.”

—JAMES P. LEARY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

“Bulik’s unfailingly interesting book has a fascinating story to tell. His analysis of the Irish roots of the Mollies is excellent and in line with the tendency of U.S. historiography to extend analysis beyond the borders of the nation. His accounts of the battles between the Mollies and the forces of law and order in Schuylkill County are well written . . . he does a service in stripping away some of the gray mist from the Mollies. This book will appeal to both a general and an academic audience.”

CAPITAL & CLASS

MARK BULIK is a senior editor at The New York Times. His most recent book is Ambush at Central Park: When the Irish Revolution Came to New York (Fordham).