American Irish Historical Society

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Kevin Cahill, President

The headquarters of the society.

The American Irish Historical Society was founded in Boston in 1897. The Society's fifty founding members included Theodore Roosevelt, who was part-Irish on his mother's side. The Society's formal purpose, as stated on its web site, is: "to place permanently on record the story of the Irish in America from the earliest settlement to the present day, justly, impartially, fully, and sympathetically correcting neglect and misrepresentation by certain historians of the part taken in the founding, upbuilding and safeguarding of the Nation by persons of Irish birth and descent." Notable members through the years have included politician William Bourke Cockran, tenor John McCormack, New York Governor Hugh Carey, and performer/composer George M. Cohan. In 1940, the Society moved to a Beaux-Arts townhouse on Central Park West in New York City, which it still occupies.^{[citation needed]}

In 2008, the society headquarters are at 991 Fifth Avenue, opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[1] After a two-year restoration and renovation program is completed in early 2008, "There will be a series of cultural and scholarly events in Spring 2008. The Library & Archives of the Society are scheduled to reopen to Members and scholars in September 2008."^[2]

The Society hosts cultural and historical events, publishes a journal entitled The Recorder, and annually awards a Gold Medal to an Irish-American or Irish-national of significant accomplishment. Past honorees have included mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ronald Reagan, and Bono from the rock group U2. [1]