Passage to America

In the middle years of the last century more than two million men, women and children abandoned the British Isles. The Irish were 'shovelled out' by absentee landlords and famine; the English went west to escape poverty and slums. Sea-sick, homesick, herded like cattle, dying like flies, they poured across the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York. They were swindled, robbed, insulted and terrorized at every stage. Making brilliant use of original diaries and letters and contemporary newspapers and prints, Terry Coleman gives us an intensely vivid account of this heroic and historic exodus.