“Thanks” to Ed Driscoll for sending me this, dammit.
Although the last line almost redeems it…
It seems that Rebecca Fried, a high school student from the Sidwell Friends school in Washington, has done a more thorough search of newspaper archives, made possible by advances in digitizing archives since Professor Jensen did his work. Her results have been published in the Oxford Press Journal of Social History, the same place where the original paper was published. And she found lots of examples of both “No Irish Need Apply” advertisements and newspaper accounts of “No Irish” signs, even though the available archives still cover only a small fraction of the thousands of papers in which such ads and accounts might have appeared.
It’s a very good paper, and having looked at an advance copy, I heartily recommend that you read it when the next issue of the journal comes out. There are a lot of interesting insights, and the most galling and surprising of them was that these signs were occasionally posted by Irish Americans themselves, which just goes to show that history is always more complicated than you think.
