In the 1850s and 1860s, Kilgubbin was often mentioned in the pages of the Tribune and other Chicago newspapers. The name became symbolic of slums where poor Irish immigrants lived in ramshackle ...

Kilgubbin won’t be found on modern-day maps of Chicago, but there once was a place known by that name — a settlement of Irish immigrants on the city’s North Side. In the 1850s and 1860s, Kilgubbin was ...

William Kennedy’s point in this passage—about illiteracy, poverty, vanished history—is a valid one. By now, though, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the Irish write no matter what. Their ...