Explanation: While the Irish had a reputation for bravery during the US Civil War, many were immigrants who came from the same circumstances - British oppression - at home. Therefore, there was no bad blood, specifically, between them and their former countrymen who had taken the opposite side of the American war, and the prospect of fighting other Irish units was not always welcomed.
Italian immigrants, on the other hand, were often from opposite sides of the Unification of Italy. Many Union Italian volunteers were idealists who had followed the great liberal-socialist revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, and joined the Union side with a determined democratic and anti-slavery view of the conflict. A significant contingent of Confederate Italian volunteers, however, were former soldiers from the Unification of Italy who had chosen exile after being defeated by Garibaldi, fleeing to the American South.
It’s unlikely that the two groups of Italians were fond of each other.
I love the context you provide for the memes posted here. I almost always learn something interesting
I always try to make the space welcoming to those ‘out-of-the-loop’!
Even if it sometimes means educating myself first to get ‘in-the-loop’ on a specific meme! XD
Win - win
Not only that, but the unification joined peoples speaking something like 50 different “dialects” of Italian. I’m not a linguist but the way I understand it, they evolved separately from Latin into a bunch of relatively similar languages. Something like 2% of the country spoke Italian Italian when the kingdom was unified.
My grandparents were from opposite ends of Italy and argued over which was the correct dialect their whole lives.
[off topic]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick's_Battalion
St. Patrick’s Battalion.
A lot of Irish immigrants were recruited to fight against the Mexicans.
They got to Mexico and realized they liked the Catholic Mexicans better than the Protestant Americans [who reminded the Irsih of their English oppressors.]
St Patrick’s brigade is one of my favorite historical errata that I think would make a phenomenal series.
Tell me you’ve never experienced meaningful violence without telling me you’ve never experienced meaningful violence. Presenting the people who didn’t want to kill their countrymen as angry soyjacks is high key disgusting
