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	A 14 year old American high-school student has called into question the research of a prominent historian who said that &lsquo;No Irish need apply&rsquo; signs didn&rsquo;t exist in the United States.</p>
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	Professor Richard Jensen published an article in the Journal of Social History in 2002 that called into question the existence of discriminatory &lsquo;no Irish need apply&rsquo; (NINA) signs in the 18th and 19th centuries in America.</p>
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	The signs are frequently used to prove that the Irish were discriminated against when they arrived in the US centuries ago.</p>
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	But Professor Jensen, who was professor of history at the University of Illinois in Chicago at the time, stated that the existence of the signs was a myth that the Irish had exaggerated, imagining that they were discriminated in the United States more than they were.</p>
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	The &ldquo;myth fostered among the Irish a misperception or gross exaggeration that other Americans were prejudiced against them,&rdquo; Jensen wrote.&nbsp;</p>
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	The claim went largely unchallenged until recently when teenager Rebecca Fried decided to start investigating his claims.</p>
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	Rebecca searched through newspaper databases on the internet and found lots of examples of the signs throughout history.</p>
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	&ldquo;Just for the fun of it, I started to run a few quick searches on an online newspaper database that I found on Google,&rdquo; she told the Daily Beast.</p>
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	&ldquo;I was really surprised when I started finding examples of NINA ads in old 19th-century newspapers pretty quickly.&rdquo;</p>
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	Her research then culminated in her own article in the Journal of Social History which seriously challenged Prof Jensen&rsquo;s work.</p>
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	Rebecca&rsquo;s article has now ignited a serious historical debate and has led many to rethink their stance on the existence of the signs, which she has shown were much more prominent than Prof Jensen had claimed.</p>
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	<a href="http://www.independent.ie/world-news/americas/american-teenager-disproves-historian-about-antiirish-signs-31429624.html">http://www.independent.ie/world-news/americas/american-teenager-disproves-historian-about-antiirish-signs-31429624.html</a></p>
