Author: Matthew McDonald

Historian Tyler Anbinder stumbled upon 19th-century records of the Emigrant Bank in New York City while he was researching a book about the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan.  What he found has upended more than 150 years of assumptions about the approximately 1.3 million immigrants from Ireland who came to the United States during and just after the Great Famine of the 1840s. His book, Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York, came out earlier this year. In an era before photo IDs, the bank, which catered to Irish, collected details on each of…