'Groundbreaking. The survivors of the Great Hunger portrayed as never before. Plentiful Country will transform your understanding of the generation who survived. They emerge from the shadows in a story of determination and hope that forged New York as we know it'
- Fin Dwyer, author of A Lethal Legacy
'While the city of New York was founded in the 1620s, the events of the 1840s on the other side of the world would transform it forever. By placing the first-hand testimonies of those who endured the Great Hunger at the heart of this history, Anbinder humanises the most dramatic event of the Irish story. The letters between the 'Old Country' and the 'New World' remind us that escape from the island meant survival, as hope faded in Ireland. A moving study that will open up the topography of New York in the mind of the reader anew'
- Donal Fallon, author of Three Castles Burning
'In the rich and splendid Plentiful Country, Tyler Anbinder has-with the aid of the precious 'test' books of the Emigrant Savings Bank-parlayed his unmatched knowledge of pre-Civil War Irish immigration to the USA, and the strident nativist reaction it provoked, and has tellingly captured the lives (and the considerable accomplishments) of the thousands of Irish famine emigrants who settled in New York. That he has done so in lucid and accessible prose, with a wealth of striking detail, is a distinct bonus. A singular achievement from one of the foremost chroniclers of the 19th century immigrant experience'
- Myles Dungan, author of Four Killings
'A masterpiece of research and writing ... vividly captures the rich history of a complex people'
- T.J. Stiles, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The First Tycoon and Custer's Trials
'Plentiful Country celebrates the survivors of Ireland's Great Famine, who are so often cast as dazed immigrants unprepared and unsuited for life in New York and America. Drawing on a decade of research, Tyler Anbinder presents them instead as women and men with agency: adept learners who, by both seizing and creating opportunities for themselves, remade their new country. They speak for themselves in this book, in word and deed'
- Hasia Diner, New York University, and author of Erin's Daughters in America
'In Tyler Anbinder's moving, expertly told narrative, I learned what happened to that generation of immigrants and their descendants. This is a hugely important and too little-known part of the American story'
- Adam Hochschild, New York Times bestselling author of Spain in Our Hearts and American Midnight