The Sons of Molly Maguire

MARK BULIK is an assistant news editor at the New York Times. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and lives with his wife and two children in West Caldwell, New Jersey.

—Breandan Mac Suibhne:
Mark Bulik's 'The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War' is a work of considerable scholarship, which carefully unpicks the tightly braided strands of ethnic, labor and party politics in the mid-nineteenth-century coal fields, especially the west branch of Schuylkill County. Drawing on the extensive research, he illuminates the competition between the Irish and other immigrant groups, and, most interestingly, the regional, class and generation tensions within the Irish community itself.

—Peter Quinn:
Mark Bulik’s The Sons of Molly Maguire is an engaging and enlightening work of historical research and scholarship. As well as bring into focus the Mollies’ role in giving America its first taste of class warfare, Bulik’s incisive and original explorations sweep aside myths, legends, half-truths, and untruths. He significantly deepens our understanding of these flesh-and blood laborers, who they were, where they came from, and how their struggle resonated through the labor movement in the United States. Thoughtful, insightful and unfailing fair, The Sons of the Molly Maguire is history at its best.

—Terry Golway:
With deft writing and impressive research, Mark Bulik offers a new explanation for a conflict that shook the very foundations of post-Civil War America. The Molly Maguires were at the center of America’s first great labor war, but as Bulik shows, the first shots of that war were fired not in northeastern Pennsylvania, but in the fields and villages of Ireland.

Bulik's unfailingly interesting book has a fascinating story to tell. His analysis of the Irish roots of the Mollies is excellent and in line with the tendency of US historiography to extend analysis beyond the borders of the nation. His accounts of the battles between the Mollies and the forces of law and order in Schuylkill county are well-written ... he does a service in stripping away some of the grey mist from the Mollies. This book will appeal to both a general and an academic audience.