During the 1840’s there was a tremendous social riot in the United States between the English colonists and the Irish immigrants. There was a “No Irish Need Apply” song composed to symbolize that the Irish were not welcome as residents or workers. This ideology started during the times when there was an English dominance in Ireland leaving the Irish with little ownership of their own lands. As the Irish arrived to New York and Boston, they were greeted with open resentment and were left to work in mines and were look at as being the scum of the scum by the other European Americans (pg 110). Differences in religion increased the hostility between the two which later also came to affect the educational systems and ideologies of what was being taught. Later, the origins of the Catholic school can be found in the centuries-old struggle between the Irish and Anglo-Saxon cultures. This cultural conflict threatened Protestant Anglo-American cultural domination.
The perception by many whites that Irish Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans were a threat to the dominance of white Protestant Anglo-American culture in the United States resulted in segregation which, consequently, affected the structure of common schools. Was there segregation between the Irish Americans, African Americans and Native Americans? If the social “minorities” of that time were really the majority, then why didn’t they try to come together to try to instill a different system in the United States where they could all have the same advantages as the Anglo-Americans? How have things changed in our current society from that of what was happening in the 1840’s or has it changed at all?
