people

Patrick with them.
             Before the mid-19th century, there was a relatively small and prosperous Irish population in the United States. During the Great Famine in Ireland in the late 1840's when the national potato crop failed for several years in a row, millions of Irish dispersed across the globe: between 1845 and 1854, approximately 1.5 million Irish people immigrated to the United States.
             Since the numbers of Irish in the U.S. grew so rapidly and most of the immigrants were poor and uneducated, the Irish encountered the same sort of racial prejudice that many new immigrants to the United States do, unfortunately. In order to face the challenges of living in a new country, the Irish immigrants banded together to celebrate the traits that they held in common: their Roman Catholic heritage, their dedication to St. Patrick, and their national myth of being survivors despite the many hardships that they had encountered over the centuries.
             The Irish in America stressed both their reliance upon one another and their heritage, as well as their newfound allegiance to the U.S. At every level of life (education, work, social networks), the Irish assimilated to American life, but they took advantage of American religious freedoms to maintain their Roman Catholic identity. As the Irish have blended into larger national life, their religious affiliation with the Catholic church has often remained their strongest bond to their Irish heritage. .
             Since the time of the great Irish immigration to the United States, St. Patrick's Day has been THE day of public celebration of Irish Roman Catholicism in the United States. Since most of the Irish initially settled in large cities here, they organized parades on St. Patrick's Day to display their large numbers, their religious affiliation, and their committed memory to their national heritage in the context of their newly forged commitment to the United States. Cities with large Irish populations, like Chicago, New York, and Boston, all have very large parades on the weekend preceding St.