Fabricating history: the making of the Molly Maguires

This thesis focuses on the popular and historical image of the Molly Maguires, an Irish-American terrorist labor group in the 1870s, and addresses the process of building a historical record about a particular issue. Since there is very little direct information about the Molly Maguires, we know about them through contemporaries, historians and fiction writers, who were often antagonistic to the Molly Maguires. The limitations of our knowledge on the Molly Maguire calls into question whether our picture of the Mollies can even be considered historical. Although current evidence belies efforts to create an accurate historical picture of the Molly Maguires, the development of the Molly Maguire image is a history in and of itself. The shifting image of the Molly Maguires reveals more about the social environment of the time period in which they were created than it does about the Molly Maguires themselves. This thesis explores a topic in the gray area between fact and fiction, demonstrating how historical knowledge can be as much a product of collective memory as empirical data.