Just a simple piece from The Daily Beast ...
A substantial portion of Conservative Ideology concerns a denial of victimhood and structural disadvantages of classes of people. "You aren't victimized! You're just lazy!"
Fitting into this attitude is a scholarly article written by Professor Richard Jensen in 2002 that refutes the long-held notion that the Irish people were denied opportunity for equal access to employment in 19th and early 20th century America - the famous "No Irish Need Apply" signs.
Jensen essentially claims they never happened, the Irish were never denied access to the job markets, they just spread that lie to justify their claim to victimhood.
In the 13 years since this paper was written, spread around with lots of support from a sector of academia that leans Conservative, this view has been essentially absorbed into academic orthodoxy, and those arguing against it have found themselves dismissed and discredited.
It's impossible to prove a negative, but a claim like this may be given some currency if no proof to the contrary is provided. As long as no one could show contemporaneous accounts or proof of the NINA phenomenon, Jensen's argument could be taken seriously.
And then a 14 year old girl did a Google search...
Rebecca Fried, a rising high school freshman—who one of the preeminent scholars on the Irish diaspora in the United States now calls a “hero” and “quite extraordinary”—... simply couldn’t believe it, either.
Rebecca never set out to prove the thesis wrong. She was just interested in an article her dad brought home from work one day...
Rebecca wasn’t even trying to disprove her dad—let alone an academic at the University of Illiniois-Chicago. She just figured she’d Google the words and see what came up over 100 years ago.
What she found from actual newspaper archives were tons of 19th century and early 20th century want ads for labor slathered with the phrase "No Irish need apply," pages of citations of the sign appearing in shop windows.
My favorite line in the article...
Then she thought, somebody had to have done this before, right?
Nope. Nobody had.
Why are people so ready to accept groundless assertions? The entire academic community had essentially written off Irish persecution in this country as a myth just because some professor with no real evidence said it didn't happen.
And it was so EASILY REFUTED!
Keep questioning authority and orthodoxy. Know bullshit when you see it. There is no reason things always have to be the way they are.