Immigration Creates Heros

It’s funny how history repeats itself. In the mid 19th Century, partly in response to the Great Famine, waves of Irish immigrants came to America. Most landed in New York, to seek a new and better life. Then as now, questions of immigration, assimilation and criminal behavior filled the air. The appropriately named Know Nothing Party grew up in opposition to these waves of immigration and filled the political dialogue with fear and hatred.

But fortunately leaders emerged in the Irish community that showed them how to be Americas. One of those was Thomas Francis Meaghar. He would become not just an Irish hero, but an American hero. Sometimes forgotten he is given new life by Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Timothy Egan in The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero

My conversation with Timothy Egan:

The Fire that Saved America

At a time when the terms "sustainability" and "green" are becoming a national religion, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Timothy Egan in his new book The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, examines their origins. Egan chronicles the story of the devastating forest fire that made Teddy Roosevelt's vision of conservation real in the American mind and that cemented his legacy as the President who saved our wild places.

It is also the story of a blaze still unmatched in the annals of American wildfires, the Big Burn lasted three days in August 1910 and decimated three million acres of forest in Washington, Montana, and Idaho. At the time, no living person had ever seen anything like those flames, and nether the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.

My conversation with Timothy Egan:Powered by Podbean.com