Ireland's tumultuous heritage combined with the promise of cosmopolitan New York to forge a new Irish-American immigrant identity. Between the Great Irish Famine and the creation of the Irish Free State, the New York Irish world preserved as much from the old country as it adopts from the new. The Shamrock and the Lily illuminates a set of remarkable transatlantic connections dominated by the road to Ireland's independence, in an absorbing study of a people driven from a troubled past toward freedom for themselves and for those they left behind.

I’ve given my life to the club. And now, I might be the reason an empire falls. Finn “Shamrock” Adair A year of my life—stolen. The number of once-in-a-lifetime moments the Cartel took from me is immeasurable. I missed the birth of my children, their first milestones, their first words. I wasn’t here when two of my brothers claimed ol’ ladies. I missed most of my sister-in-law’s pregnancy and wasn’t there to help my sister through her miscarriage. Most of all, I wasn’t here to lay my mother to rest. Missing all those things, getting my life back, being the man they needed for a year, but I couldn’t be, is all that should matter to me. That should be my only focus now that I’m home and with my club again. But the Cartel destroyed that man that once ran this club. Used as a guinea pig to test their newest drugs, the only thing I want to do, the only thing I can seem to focus on, is getting high again. A year in a constant state of being out of my mind has left me as little more than a junkie. I want to do the right thing, but I can’t. The demons unleashed in me are too strong, have too great a hold now. My club isn’t going to give up, though, and for once, their greatest adversary isn’t an outside force—it’s me. I held this club together for so long, waited a lifetime to get my woman back, and now? I just might be the very reason it all crumbles to the ground.

When the uniforms borrowed for the St. Patrick's Day Parade turn out to be too old and too big, Michelle Swoop tries to find a way to save the day for the Lincoln Lions Band.