Some of the best modern scholarship on the Irish in America comes from Kerby Miller. His essay "Class, Culture, and Immigrant Group Identity in the United States: The Case of Irish-American Ethnicity," provided the background for this story (in Virginia Yans-Mclaughlin Ed., Immigration Reconsidered, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
One book on the situation of Maine's Irish in the nineteenth century is James Mundy's Hard Times, Hard Men: Maine and the Irish 1830-1860 (Scarborough, Maine: Harp Publications, 1990).
The most recent book about the Irish in Maine is They change their sky: the Irish in Maine, edited by Michael C. Connolly (Orono, Maine: University of Maine Press, 2004.)
