In their short introduction to After the Flood, the editors note that Irish American historiography has traditionally focussed on the nineteenth century, particularly the years of the Great Famine (1). In line with more recent studies, which challenge this narrow chronological scope, Rogers and O'Brien make a claim for the years 1945 to 1960 as “a distinct historical and cultural moment” in Irish America, arguing that Irish American ethnicity is of “pivotal significance” in these years (4). Indeed, 1945 to 1960 might be “the most important single period for twentieth-century Irish-American ethnicity” (5). They and other contributors (notably Margaret Lee) are keen to discredit the thesis of “ethnic fade” which proposes a “straight-line course of assimilation that would reduce ethnicity to a romanticized affectation” (2). Rogers and O'Brien need not be so emphatic in their claims, which are, in any case, very difficult to prove. This is a thoroughly original project, spanning history, politics and cultural studies (literature, film, sport, music), that justifies its existence in its very title. While the historical ground has been covered quite comprehensively by Linda Dowling Almeida in Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945–1995 (2001), it is true that very little analysis of Irish American culture in these years exists and, moreover, that Almeida's New York focus necessarily ignores the regional expanse of Irish migration to, and Irish American influence in, the US during this period.

One of the most illuminating and convincing contexts discussed by several contributors is that of the legacy of World War II and the ensuing Cold War. In O'Brien's essay, he argues that the mainstream American preoccupation with the Red Scare in the immediate postwar years presented the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, whose membership and influence had declined in the 1930s and early 1940s, with an opportunity to reinvent itself in opposition to the “Anti-Christ” of communism and, thus, to promote Irish Catholicism's compatibility with American patriotism. Stephanie Rains discusses the sensational story of Colorado housewife Virginia Tighe, who “apparently recalled, under hypnosis, a previous life in nineteenth-century Ireland” as Bridey Murphy (132). At a moment during which there were fears of communist brainwashing, hypnosis was a controversial pursuit. Meanwhile, Edward Hagan's essay on The Quiet Man (1952), undoubtedly the most exhaustively discussed Irish American cultural phenomenon of the 1950s, draws upon its appearance in the aftermath of World War II as a previously unconsidered context for the film. Hagan reads Seán Thornton's search for “peace and quiet” in the light of “that constellation of postwar psychological hangovers that since the 1970s have come to be grouped under the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” (102).

Almost inevitably with an edited collection, the quality of the essays is not consistently robust. Nonetheless, After the Flood fills an important gap (post-Depression; pre-JFK) in scholarship of Irish America, and, indeed, the contributors do not ignore the historiography of this scholarship itself. Fittingly, Charles Fanning concludes the collection by noting the foundation of the American Committee for Irish Studies (now the American Conference for Irish Studies) in 1960.