O'donnell, Edward T. 1963-

views updated

O'DONNELL, Edward T. 1963-

PERSONAL:

Born 1963; married; wife's name Stephanie; children: Erin, Kelly, Michelle, Katherine. Education: Holy Cross College (Worcester, MA), B.A. (history), 1986; Columbia University, M.A. (history), 1989, M.Phil., 1991, Ph.D. (ethnic and urban history), 1995.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Holden, MA. Office—Department of History, 1 College St., College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA 01610. E-mail—eodonnell@holycross.edu.

CAREER:

Historian, educator, and author. Hunter College, City University of New York, associate professor of history, 1995-2001; Holy Cross College, Worcester, MA, associate professor of history, 2001—. Columbia University, visiting assistant summer-session professor, 1997—; Fordham University, visiting associate professor, 2001. Exhibit curator, lecturer, and tour guide. Commentator on television and radio; commentator on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Alliance for New York City History, member of executive board, 1999-2001.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Named New York City Centennial Historian, 1999.

WRITINGS:

1,001 Things Everyone Should Know about Irish American History, Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat "General Slocum," Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Henry George for Mayor! Irish Nationalism, Labor Radicalism, and Independent Politics in Gilded-Age New York City, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

(Coauthor) Visions of America: A History of the United States, Addison Wesley Longman (Reading MA), 2005.

Contributor to books, including New York Walks, Henry Holt, 1992; The Hungry Stream: Emigration from Ireland during the Great Famine, Institute of Irish Studies Press, 1997; The Irish in America, edited by Terry Golway, Hyperion Press, 1997; and Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, University of Notre Dame Press, 2000; contributor to periodicals, including Journal of Urban History, New York Times, and American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Author of column "Hibernian Chronicle," for Irish Echo (newspaper). Project editor, Encyclopedia of New York, Yale University Press, 1995.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

The nonfiction books The Ethnic Crucible: New York City's Lower East Side, 1820-2000 and The Road Well Traveled: 101 Stories of Wisdom, Achievement, and Inspiration from the American Past.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian and educator Edward T. O'Donnell has spent much of his career studying and popularizing the early history of the metropolitan New York area. Earning advanced degrees at New York City's Columbia University, and teaching at the city's Hunter College, he was also active in promoting local history by hosting walking tours of the city's ethnic neighborhoods and working to further other history-related projects. When the wreckage of the steamship General Slocum was discovered off the New Jersey coast in 2000, it served as inspiration for O'Donnell's Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat "General Slocum," an account of the greatest disaster to occur in New York City until surpassed by the events of September 11, 2001.

On June 15, 1904, 1,300 New Yorkers boarded the General Slocum, a steamship that transported passengers from the city's Lower East Side across Long Island Sound. Among those passengers, most were German-American families, members of a local East Side church, who planned to take a group picnic on Long Island. After a small fire broke out in a storage room, negligence on the part of the ship's owner, an untrained crew, rotting life preservers, the passengers' general lack of swimming ability, and the shortage of life boats resulted in the deaths of 1,000 passengers and the loss of the ship. The fire left behind another legacy, however; as O'Donnell explained to Publishers Weekly interviewer Dylan Foley, "Though the 'Little Germany' neighborhood on the Lower East Side was dissolving like most ethnic neighborhoods, the General Slocum disaster obliterated it from the ethnic map of New York." While made much of by the press for a time, the tragedy slipped from public memory, particularly after public sentiment turned heavily against Germans at the approach of World War I.

Writing in Publishers Weekly, a critic noted of Ship Ablaze that O'Donnell presents a compelling backdrop to the tragedy by explaining what life was like in the first years of the twentieth century and also shows how newspapers helped drum up public furor following the fire. Tales of heroism and stories of shady business dealings are told side by side, and the historian ends by putting the General Slocum tragedy into a context by which readers can compare it to the terrorist attacks on the city of almost a century later. "In O'Donnell's deft hands," the critic concluded, "the disaster becomes more than just a historical event—it's a fascinating window into an era, a community and the lives of ordinary people." Booklist contributor Gavin Quinn also praised the book, noting that Ship Ablaze "does not feel like printed history, but rather a terrible scene that has just unfolded in front of the reader." In Ship Ablaze, according to a reviewer for Library Journal, O'Donnell creates a "fascinating book, researched with care and written with sensitivity."