The_great_famine
The great famine means the great hunger ,was a period of mass starvation , diease and
emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1852during which the island's population dropped by 20–25 percent.
Approximately one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland. The proximate cause of famine was a potato disease commonly known as potato
blight(马铃薯晚疫病).Although blight
ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland—where a third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food—was exacerbated by a host of political, social and economic factors which remain the subject of historical debate.
The famine was a watershed(分水岭) in the
history of Ireland. Its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political and cultural landscape. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora(离散),
the famine entered folk memory and became a rallying point for various nationalist
movements. Modern historians regard it as a dividing line in the Irish historical narrative, referring to the preceding period of Irish history as "pre-Famine."
While the famine was responsible for a
significant increase in emigration from Ireland, of anywhere from 45% to nearly 85%,
depending on the year and the county it was not the sole cause. Nor was it even the era when mass emigration from Ireland
commenced. That can be traced to the middle of the 18th century, when some quarter of a million people left Ireland to settle in the New World alone, over a period of some fifty years. From the defeat of Napoleon to the beginning of the famine, a period of thirty years, "at least one million emigrated".
Emigration during the famine years of 1845 to 1850 was to England, Scotland, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Many of those
fleeing to the America .
In America, most Irish became city-dwellers: with little money, many had to settle in the cities that the ships they came on landed in. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston, Massachusetts; New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Baltimore, Maryland. In addition, Irish populations became prevalent in some American mining communities.