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The Daily Beast Podcast: A Teenager Fact-Checks Irish History

On The Daily Beast Podcast, senior editor Ben Collins explains how a teenage girl debunked a historical myth about Irish immigrants.

“No Irish Need Apply.”

The discrimination Irish immigrants in the U.S. once faced was summed up in the signs posted in newspapers and in the windows of storefronts. But that history of discrimination was almost erased. In 2002, University of Illinois-Chicago professor Richard J. Jensen published a paper titled “No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization” and argued that the infamous signs were rarely, if ever, used, and dismissed them as an invention.

The Internet amplified the professor’s claim, and soon it was fairly accepted knowledge (Vox wrote about it earlier this year) that the signs were fake.

Then a teenage sleuth named Rebecca Fried did a little digging and found dozens of examples of the signs in actual use.

On The Daily Beast Podcast, US News senior editor Ben Collins talks with Daily Beast executive editor Noah Shachtman and BeastStyle senior editor Tim Teeman about how a sixteen-year-old girl uncovered the truth and corrected the historical record.

“She pretty much saved the day,” Collins says.

The Daily Beast podcast is excerpted from Daily Beast Radio on Sirius XM Insight 121, which airs Saturdays at 9am and Sundays at 5am and 12pm. Sirius subscribers can listen to the entire show online. You can subscribe to the Daily Beast Podcast in the iTunes store. Our theme music is by the Breuss Arrizabalaga Quintet.

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Owen Agnew

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