I’ve written and am seeking a publisher for a book about a village on the Erris coast of County Mayo, where I found unusually strong community connections. I see these as a legacy of a communal land system that persisted there until 1860. In that year, the landlord dismantled the communal system, throwing many of his tenants onto the road. Three journal articles present relevant historical research:

Tom Yager, “Mass eviction in the Mullet Peninsula during and after the Great Famine,” Irish Economic and Social History XXIII, 1996.

Tom Yager, “Erris’s Capitalist Revolution,” The Recorder: Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, Fall 1998.

Tom Yager, “What Was Rundale and Where Did it Come from?” Béaloideas: journal of Irish folklore, 2002.

My research was supported in part by a Ford Foundation Award for Humanistic Perspectives on Contemporary Society.

My interest in community life dates from my participation in a French village study in the 1960’s:

Laurence Wylie, ed., Chanzeaux: a village in Anjou, Harvard University Press, 1966. (This was a collaborative effort. I wrote sections about the farm economy, the effects of farm mechanization, new forms of cooperation, and migration in the 19th and 20th centuries.)

Tom Yager and Paul Williams, “Chanzeaux” (1965), a film about a political conflict in the same village. It was shown on WNET-TV, channel 13, a public television station in New York.

L. Wylie, W. Christian, G. de Ménil, T. Yager, “Habitat et migrations à Chan¬zeaux,” Etudes rurales 29, 1968.