In 1996, when I visited New York to speak at some local universities, I was surprised to read a story on the front page of The New York Times. The Republican Governor of the state, George Pataki, had just signed into law a new curriculum for state high schools in the field of patriotism, citizenship, and human rights. The curriculum made it compulsory for schools to teach their students that Britain had committed genocide against the Irish in the Great Famine of 1845–50. The newspaper quoted Governor Pataki saying at a function attended by the Irish President Mary Robinson: “History teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” Similar laws were about to be introduced into the education curriculum of the state of New Jersey and were pending in other states.
I was no expert in Irish history, but I found all this rather strange because, at the time, the debate within academic history over the Great Famine was still a contested one, with mainly American social historians pushing the genocide thesis but economic historians in Ireland itself prominent among the skeptics. Hence, it seemed pretty clear that influential members of the American political and educational elites were exploiting history to mount a campaign to trash the reputation of the
