In time the Know-Nothings faded away, but the AOH grew stronger. The Order switched its focus to indeed supporting charitable activities of the Church, assisting new Irish immigrants in finding employment, and preserving the Irish language, history and culture. However, the Hibernian have not abandoned their roots, and today are defending the Church against attacks by those who would see its teachings destroyed. The Order is active in the Right To Life movement in all areas of the country. And as in days past, the AOH is still called upon to protect Church property. Such was the case in 1992, when, at the request of Cardinal O'Connor, over 1,000 Hibernians stood guard over St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City when it was threatened by violent activists disrupting the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

The late John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, was the most distinguished lay member ever to join the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America since it was founded. He joined in 1947 and remained active and interested until the day of his assassination November 22, 1963. The John F. Kennedy Memorial Committee and Fund were established at the 1964 National Convention in Albany. The First Annual Award, a 14-Kt. Gold Medal, specially designed and struck, was presented to Hon. James A. Farley, former Postmaster General, and a long time member of our Order, at the Chicago Convention in 1966. Since that time many outstanding honorees have been the recipient of this award including: President Bill Clinton, John Hume, Ambassador Rav Flynn, and Gerry Adams.

It began with a blight of the potato crop that left acre upon acre of Irish farmland covered with black rot. As harvests across Europe failed, the price of food soared. Subsistence-level Irish farmers found their food stores rotting in their cellars, the crops they relied on to pay the rent into their British and Protestant landlords destroyed. Peasants who ate the rotting produce sickened and entire villages were consumed with cholera and typhus. Parish priests desperate to provide for their congregations were forced to forsake buying coffins in order to feed starving families, with the dead going unburied or buried only in the clothes they wore when they died.

Landlords evicted hundreds of thousands of peasants, who then crowded into disease-infested workhouses. Other landlords paid for their tenants to emigrate, sending hundreds of thousands of Irish to America and other English-speaking countries. But even emigration was no panacea — ship owners often crowded hundreds of desperate Irish onto rickety vessels labeled "coffin ships. In many cases, these ships reached port after losing a third of their passengers to disease, hunger and other causes. While Britain provided much relief for Ireland's starving populace, many Irish criticized Britain's delayed response -- and further blamed centuries of British political oppression on the underlying causes of the famine.

The Irish Famine of 1846-50 took as many as one million lives from hunger and disease, and changed the social and cultural structure of Ireland in profound ways. The Famine also spurred new Waves of immigration, thus shaping the histories of the United States and Britain as well.
  
The combined forces of famine, disease and emigration depopulated the island; Ireland's population dropped from 8 million before the Famine to 5 million years after. If Irish nationalism was dormant for the first half of the nineteenth-century, the Famine convinced Irish citizens and Irish-Americans of the urgent need for political change. The Famine also changed centuries-old agricultural practices, hastening the end of the division of family estates into tiny lots capable of sustaining life only with a potato crop.