Michael O'Malley

@[email protected]
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227 Posts

historian at GMU, musical hack, Philly guy. Author of multiple books, most recently The Color of Family: History, Race and the Politics of Ancestry(U Chicago 2024). https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo236256485.html

Also Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (1990)
Face Value: The Entwined Histories of Money and Race in America (2012)
The Beat Cop: Chicago's Chief O'Neill and the Creation of Irish Music (2022)

Michael O'MalleyFeb 23, 2025
Trump and Musk are planning a big inspection of Ft. Knox. They will find that there is little or no gold there They will probably work with Fox to hype this news and treat it as crisis and use it to make cuts. Don't be fooled by the hype: gold in Ft Knox has not mattered one bit since at least 1972, that is, for more than fifty years. This is theater by malign actors, trying to undermine the republic for their own ends.
https://michaelomalley.info/uncate.../fort-knox-and-theater/
Fort Knox and Phony Crisis | Mike O’Malley

Michael O'MalleyNov 7, 2024

One of the many horrifying things about this election is the return of eugenics, especially in the language of JD Vance, his patron Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, all obsessed with birth rates and racial decline.

My book charts the history and origin of eugenical thinking, using family history as a lens.

Michael O'MalleySep 27, 2024

My forthcoming book The Color of Family was selected as November "must-read book" by the Next Big Ideas Book Club.

https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/next-big-idea-clubs-november-2024-must-read-books/51785/

The Next Big Idea Club’s November 2024 Must-Read Books

These titles make up our sixth group of nominees for Season 25 of the Next Big Idea Club.

Next Big Idea Club
Michael O'MalleyMar 18, 2024
Got the cover image for my new book
Michael O'MalleySep 2, 2023

Thinking about Coffee County, GA, and the attempt to suppress the vote and overturn the election results.

I'm finishing a book that's partly about two ancestors, one born in Ireland, who were declared to be colored people in Virginia.

Michael O'MalleyJan 9, 2023
Over Christmas I showed some of these to my niece. She said "But we don't look anything like that! Ethnic caricatures train people how to see. White people look at an Af-Am. college professor and "see" a criminal. 19th century Americans were trained to see the Irish as brutish and violent. Below, the Nast caricature and my ancestor, the one who was declared colored. People are taught how to see
Michael O'MalleyJan 9, 2023
A few more Irish cartoons. This one, again from Nast, is titled "the Greek Slave" after a famous classical statue. In the border, Nast drew on the upper left an Irish immigrant arriving and being seized and "branded" by the Democratic Party and then below, "slave drivers" whip him to the polling place. The typically brutish Irishman ends chained to Tammany Hall.
It's very similar to anti-immigrant rhetoric today, which imagines one party encouraging immigration so it can "enslave" voters.
Michael O'MalleyJan 5, 2023
And there is often a kind of twinning of black and irish characters. Racecraft and its relation to ancestry needs a more complex exploration than just "how the Irish became white"
Show threadMichael O'MalleyJan 5, 2023
The Irish were not the only people characterized as apes
Show threadMichael O'MalleyJan 5, 2023
Irish monkees, from Harper's Weekly, 1878 and 1873