Canal Diggers, Church Builders: Dispelling Stereotypes of the Irish on the Illinois & Michigan Canal Corridor

Dr. Eileen McMahon is Professor of History at Lewis University specializing in Irish American history. She is the author of “What Parish Are You From?” The Chicago Irish Community and Race Relations, 1916–1970 (1995); “Illinois,” in An Encyclopedia of the Irish in America (1999); “Irish Women in the American Civil War,” in Arthur H. Mitchell, ed., Fighting Irish in the American Civil War and the Invasion of Mexico (2017), and with Theodore J. Karamanski. Chicago’s Civil War: A History in Documents (2014).