¹ Irish Folklore Commission Questionnaires, MS 1407.

² This manuscript collection consists of twenty-six one-hundred-page notebooks. Twenty-six interviewers asked thirteen questions concerning emigration to America in sixteen counties. The manuscript collection is now available in digitized form through the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA). Archivist Criostoir Mac Carthaigh provided invaluable assistance in accessing the archive.

³ Schrier, Arnold, Ireland and the American Migration, 1850–1900 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958)Google Scholar.

⁴ Mark Wyman writes, in disagreement with Schrier, “the overall record leaves no doubt that America was prominent in the drive for Ireland's independence, and return migration was one of the crucial ingredients.”Wyman, Mark, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 166Google Scholar.

⁵ Zuelow, Eric G. E., Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

⁶ Nora, Pierre, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–8)Google Scholar. In this, Nora's principal work, essayists write on subjects as diverse as Jansenists, the St.-Malo–Geneva line, and the village church as aspects of French national identity. See also Hue-Tam Ho Tai, “Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory,” American Historical Review, 106 (June 2001), 906–22.

⁷ Sturken, Marita, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁸ O'Meally, Robert and Fabre, Genevieve, eds., History and Memory in African-American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, 7. O'Meally and Fabre further explain, “a lieu de mémoire may be historical or legendary, event or figure, a book or an era, a place or an idea”; it can be “simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in sensuous experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration,” nonetheless it is “material, symbolic, and functional.”

⁹ Ibid., 8–9.

¹⁰ Between 1848 and 1851, one million fled the Irish Potato Famine. Blessing, Patrick J., “The Irish,” in Thernstrom, Stephan et al. , eds., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 528Google Scholar.

¹¹ Speech of Irish President Mary McAleese at the opening of the Irish Hunger Memorial, 16 July 2002, accessed 18 Oct. 2012, available at www/emsc.nysed.gov/nyssa/gif/mcaleese%20speech%20at%20humger%20memorial.htm.

¹² Miller, Kerby A., Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 345Google Scholar.

¹³ Ibid., 345. Miller underscores the “largely … economic reasons” for this migration.

¹⁴ Ibid., 475.

¹⁵ Ibid., 528. By the twentieth century these numbers dropped dramatically. Between 1911 and 1920, only 2.5% of all immigrants to the United States came from Ireland (still the impressive number of 146,000).

¹⁶ Diner, Haisa, Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Nolan, Janet A., Ourselves Alone: Women's Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Historians David Roediger and Noel Ignatiev, among others, have shown that as the Irish “became white” in America they were complicit in reinforcing the subjugation of African Americans. Roediger, David R., The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York and London: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar; Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ On European return migration generally see Wyman, Round-Trip to America.

¹⁹ Patrick J. Blessing points out, “Large-scale Irish peasant movement to the New World, therefore, was not a mindless flight from intolerable conditions, but, within the limited range of alternatives, a deliberate departure of generally literate individuals who were very much concerned with the survival and well-being of friends remaining at home.” Blessing, 530.

²⁰ Wyman, 10.

²¹ Ibid., 165.

²² Ibid., 6.

²³ Irish Folklore Commission Questionnaires, MS 1407, 45. Information collected by Tadhg O'Murchadha, Waterville, Co. Kerry.

²⁴ Irish Folklore Commission Questionnaires, MS 1411, 35–6. Interview with Annie McColgan, Pollan, Ballyliffin, Co. Donegal.

²⁵ Irish Folklore Commission Questionnaires, MS 1408, 111. Information collected by Joseph Wade, Crookedwood Mullingan, Co. Westmeath.

²⁶ Irish Folklore Collection Questionaire, MSS 1409, 107. Information collected by Michael Corduff, Rossport, Ballina, Co. Mayo. In his study of the return migration of European emigrants, historian Mark Wyman acknowledges the conflict between industrial and preindustrial time in a chapter appropriately titled “Leaving the Land of Bosses and Clocks.” Wyman, 107.

²⁷ Arnold Schrier writes that “the great majority of people interviewed were well advanced in years, generally in their seventies and eighties, since such people were the ones most likely to have had first-hand experiences of the phenomena under consideration.” Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration 1850–1900, 187 n. 1.

²⁸ Could the differences between the Returned Yank and the Irish reporting on the Yank simply mean different personalities migrate or stay? Are the adventuresome and those open to change the Irish who found themselves in America while their more traditional neighbors and siblings stayed home? Historian Patrick J. Blessing points to that particular aspect of Irish migration and suggests “relative pooled resources to send out younger and more energetic family members who earned and remitted sufficient funds to pay the fares of those who remained behind.” Blessing, 530.

²⁹ Smiles, Samuel, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Conduct and Character (John Murray: London, 1860)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Thomas Mooney, Nine Years in America by Thomas Mooney: A Traveller for Several Years in the U. S. of A., the Canadas, and other British Provinces in A Series of Letters to his cousin Patrick Mooney A Farmer in Ireland (Dublin, 1850), 15–16Google Scholar. Thanks to David Sim for directing me to Mooney's book.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Ibid., 137, original emphasis. For an excellent discussion of the link between character and class see Hilkey, Judy, Character Is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

³³ Miller, Kerby A., “Paddy's Paradox: Emigration to American in Irish Imagination and Rhetoric,” in Miller, Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration (Dublin: Field Day, 2008), 98–123, 101Google Scholar.

³⁴ One survey respondent specifically noted the Returned Yank trope in Maura Laverty's novel Never No More.

³⁵ O'Leary, Philip, “Yank Outsiders: Irish Americans in Gaelic Fiction and Drama of the Irish Free State, 1922–1939,” in Fanning, Charles, ed., New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 253–65, 254Google Scholar.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Ibid., 260.

³⁸ Frawley, Oona, Memory Ireland, Volume 1, History and Modernity (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011), xxiGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Some of these songs originated in Ireland, some in America, some elsewhere. “Come Back to Erin,” popularized on the American vaudeville circuit, was written and composed in England by Charlotte Alington in 1866. Frank A. Fahey wrote one version of “Galway Bay” in the nineteenth century. It contains the lines “'Tis far away I am today from scenes I roamed as a boy / And long ago the hour I know I first saw Illinois.” A better-known version was written by Dr. Arthur Colohan in 1947 and popularized by Bing Crosby. In 1876, one of the most popular songs in America was “I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen,” written by Thomas Westendorf, an Illinois music teacher.

⁴⁰ O'Meally and Fabre, History and Memory, 5.

⁴¹ O'Faolain, Sean, Come Back to Erin (London: Cape, 1940)Google Scholar; see McCaffrey, Lawrence J., “Sean O'Faolain and Irish Identity,” New Hibernia Review, 9, 4 (Winter 2005), 144–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² O'Faolain, 85.

⁴³ Stephanie Rains, The Irish-American in Popular Culture, 1945–2000 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), 153.

⁴⁴ Laverty, Maura, Never No More (Templegate: London, 1942, 1988), 70–73Google Scholar. Critical assessments of Laverty's work can be found in Gibbons, Luke, “From Kitchen Sink to Soap: Drama and the Serial Form on Irish Television,” in Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: University of Cork Press, 1996), 44–69Google Scholar, in the preface to the 1942 edition of Never No More by Sean O'Faolain, and the preface to the 1985 and 1992 Virago reissues of the novel by Maeve Binchy.

⁴⁵ Cary, Meredith, “Going Home: The ‘Returned Yank’ in Irish and Irish-American Fiction” Colby Quarterly, XXIX, 1 (March, 1993), 57–67Google Scholar. The novels are: Binchy, Maeve, Firefly Summer (New York, 1988)Google Scholar, Hynes, James, The Wild Colonial Boy (New York, 1990)Google Scholar, and O'Faolain, Julia, No Country for Young Men (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 62. Cary also makes the point that some American characters in the novels she analyzes seem unaware of the matriarchal tradition in Ireland – they urge the Irish, particularly Irish women, to “work on” their appearance to become more attractive to men, a clear example of a contemporary culture in which women's value is largely their attractiveness to men.

⁴⁷ Rains, Stephanie, The Irish-American in Popular Culture, 1945–2000 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), 153Google Scholar. Maeve Connolly also references the gendered aspects of The Quiet Man with the comment that Sean Thornton “sought to recover a past coded in maternal terms.” Connolly, Maeve, “‘A Bit of Traveller in Everybody’: Traveller Identities in Irish and American Culture,” in Negra, Diana, ed., The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 282–317, 303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Gibbons, Luke, The Quiet Man (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), 47–49Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 91. Gibbons provides an extended analysis of two of these films, The Field (1990) and This Is My Father (1997). He further claims that Angela's Ashes (1999) “reverses” The Quiet Man by “looking to America as the answer to Ireland's ills.”

⁵⁰ It would be interesting and instructive to compare African American tourism to African slave forts as a similar lieu de mémoire.

⁵¹ On Ireland during this period see Foster, Roy, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁵² Gray, Breda, “Global Modernities and the Gendered Epic of the Irish Empire,” in Ahmed, Sara et al. , eds., Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (Berg: Oxford and New York, 2003), 157–78Google Scholar.

⁵³ Contemporary scholarship increasingly demonstrates the gendered experience of migration. See, for example, Travers, Pauric, “Emigration and Gender: The Case of Ireland 1922–1960,” in O'Dowd, Mary and Wichert, Sabine, eds., Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women's status in Church, State and Society (Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, 1995), 187–199Google Scholar; and Grace Neville, “Dark Lady of the Archives: Toward an Analysis of Women and Emigration to North America in Irish Folklore,” in ibid., 200–14; Ryan, Mary, “A Feminism of Their Own? Irish Women's History and Contemporary Irish Women's Writing,” Estudios Irlandeses, 5 (2010), 91–101Google Scholar. Foster, 38–56.

⁵⁴ Ni Laoire, Caitriona, “The ‘Green Green Grass of Home’? Return Migration to Rural Ireland,” Journal of Rural Studies, 23 (2007), 332–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 332.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Diane Negra, “Introduction,” in Negra, The Irish in Us, 3.

⁵⁸ Negra, The Irish in Us, 339.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 341.

⁶⁰ Gray, 157.

⁶¹ Ibid., 168.

⁶² Ibid., 169.

⁶³ Colim Toibin's best selling novel Brooklyn, a Returned Yank narrative, appeared after I had completed research for this article and further testifies to the resiliency of the Returned Yank trope. Its protagonist, Eilis Lacey, leaves Ireland for 1950s New York. There she encounters modernity and sexual liberation. When she returns to Ireland thinking she might stay she finds she is more comfortable in multi-ethnic New York so returns to Brooklyn rather than to Erin.

⁶⁴ Tai, “Remembered Realms,” 913.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 910.