ABSTRACT During the 1870s, Daniel O’Leary was the biggest sporting star in the United States. The champion race-walker (or pedestrian, to use the language of the times) was renowned for his speed and his endurance, and travelled the country from San Francisco to New York to put on athletic displays for massive crowds. The newspapers held O’Leary up as an American hero, despite the fact that he was a recent immigrant from Ireland. In this article, we examine the factors that allowed O’Leary to transcend his immigrant status in an era when many others had trouble doing the same. It took a series of temporal accidents – O’Leary’s athletic prime coinciding with a period of relatively favourable views of the Irish, coupled with the flash-in-the-pan popularity of six-day pedestrian races – but in the end Dan O’Leary transformed in the public eye from Irish-American to American. Using newspaper reports and editorials, we can see how the way he was described changed as he grew more successful. Thus, O’Leary stands as evidence not just that sport was used as a tool of assimilation as early as the 1870s, but also that the press had remarkable power to decide who was and was not American.

中文翻译：

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Daniel O'Leary 和爱尔兰移民在美国的运动经历

摘要 在 1870 年代，丹尼尔·奥利里 (Daniel O'Leary) 是美国最大的体育明星。冠军赛步行者（或行人，使用时代的语言）以他的速度和耐力而闻名，并从旧金山到纽约为大量人群进行运动表演。报纸将奥利里称为美国英雄，尽管他最近是爱尔兰移民。在本文中，我们研究了在许多其他人都难以做到这一点的时代，让 O'Leary 超越其移民身份的因素。它发生了一系列短暂的意外——奥利里的运动巅峰时期与爱尔兰人相对有利的时期相吻合，再加上为期六天的步行赛的昙花一现——但最终丹·奥利里在公众眼中从爱尔兰裔美国人转变为美国人。通过报纸报道和社论，我们可以看到随着他越来越成功，人们对他的描述方式发生了怎样的变化。因此，奥利里不仅证明了体育早在 1870 年代就被用作同化的工具，而且证明媒体具有决定谁是美国人还是不是美国人的非凡权力。