Stories From The Stacks

Leprechauns have hocked Irish goods to American consumers for generations. When one of the wee folk appeared on a bottle of Irish whisky, its familiar associations marked the drink as an authentic product of an antique culture for the American consumer. From the Blarney Stone to the shamrock, symbols laden with Irish associations in the American mind have proved useful marketing tools for businesses that sought to leverage the value of the word “Irish” in the American marketplace. In this episode of Stories from the Stacks, historian of the Irish-American experience Marion Casey, professor at the Glucksman Ireland House at New York University, discusses the commercial use of Irish culture to sell goods to American consumers. The Irish people possessed an idea of Ireland and its identity that different from that held in the popular American mind. This forced Irish-American businesses to leverage popular preconceptions of Ireland as quaint, natural, and antique, even as they sought to reorient the Irish econo