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The pope, a knight and a bishop on the edge of Christendom: the politics of exclusion in thirteenth-century Ireland Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-09 John Marshall
This article provides a re-appraisal of the land dispute between the lord of Leinster, William Marshal, and the bishop of Ferns, Ailbe Ó Máelmuaid, in the 1210s. In 1215, Ailbe petitioned the pope to solve the dispute, leading to the pronouncement of an interdict and excommunication against the Marshal. It is argued that after King John of England died and the Marshal became regent of England in 1216
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Colonialist intervention in a metropolitan revolution: reconsidering A remonstrance of divers remarkeable passages Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Sean Kelsey
This article presents findings from a fresh examination of a familiar source, shedding new light on the creation of one of the best-known contemporary accounts of the 1641 Irish uprising. It is argued that a text usually regarded as the work of Henry Jones, dean of Kilmore, ought to be understood as the intellectual property of both a team of authors and their sponsors, a New English faction at Dublin
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The impact of military demobilisation on rising Irish migration to London, c.1750–1850 Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Adam Crymble
Irish soldiers demobilised in London after major eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century wars were an important but overlooked source of unintentional Irish migrants to the capital. Their migration was linked to the centralised military pension system, which meant that servicemen in English regiments had to present themselves for a medical examination at Chelsea or Greenwich hospitals — both in the
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‘Information from which money can be made is what is required’: William Blackwoods and the Irish Ordnance Memoir Commission of 1843-4 Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Ian Hill
The Irish Ordnance memoir scheme attempted to produce wide-ranging ‘statistical’ memoirs on a national basis, to accompany the large-scale (six-inch) mapping of the country by the Irish Ordnance Survey. Dating to the early 1830s, the memoir scheme had a stop-start existence and only published a specimen account for the parish of Templemore, County Londonderry (1837). But the scheme's overall aims of
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The Weaver Street bombing in Belfast 1922: violence, politics and memory Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Nadia Dobrianska
On 13 February 1922, an unidentified person threw a bomb into Weaver Street, which was full of Catholic children at play, killing four children and two women. The bombing became a locus of political controversy between the British government, the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State and the government of Northern Ireland, and became the archetypal story of innocent Catholic lives taken by
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British Army intelligence in provincial Ireland, 1919‒1921: organisation, outcomes and the 6th Division blacklist Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Andy Bielenberg, John Borgonovo
Intelligence played a critical role in the Irish War of Independence, though debate remains about the effectiveness of British information-gathering. Historians have focused largely on the intelligence war in Dublin. This article examines British Army intelligence in the 6th Division area (roughly the southern third of the island). It will contextualise British military intelligence before the conflict
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Ethnographic collections in Northern Ireland and the Solomon Islands tomako (canoe) at the Ulster Museum, 1898–2023 Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Briony Widdis
The World Cultures collection at National Museums Northern Ireland is an essential source for the study of Irish collecting in the wider British Empire. The 2022 redisplay of the collection in the Ulster Museum's exhibition, Inclusive Global Histories, is part of a staged engagement with local and source communities. Given the critical importance of the global museum decolonisation work of which the
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A lacuna in Irish historiography: the Irish peregrini from Eoin MacNeill to The Cambridge history of Ireland and beyond Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Alexander O'Hara
This article highlights some of the historiographical trends over the past one hundred years in how the Irish diaspora in early medieval Europe has been studied. The role of the peregrini, the Irish monastic exiles who left Ireland for Britain and continental Europe from the sixth century onwards, has to some extent been marginal and tangential to the historiography of this island. Forms of modern
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Prelude to the Tudor conquest: Henry VIII and the Irish expedition of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, 1520–22 Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Steven G. Ellis
During the brief ‘universal peace’ following the treaty of London in 1518, Surrey's expedition brought to Ireland as chief governor Henry VIII's best general, ostensibly leading a reconnaissance in force to discover how the king might reduce the land to order and obedience. Despite the expedition's protracted planning, as here outlined, the king's aims remained unclear, at least to Surrey. His army
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Overlords, underlords and landlords: negotiating land and lordship in plantation Munster Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Margaret K. Smith
This article explores the legal strategies of negotiation employed by Gaelic lords in early modern Munster through a case study of the O'Driscoll lordship of Collymore, County Cork. The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced an environment of intense legal contestation, as indigenous legal practices and hierarchies were methodically attacked by the colonial administration. But, as English
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Flaying the sheep: the 1657 assessment tax and the problems of government in Cromwellian Ireland Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Patrick Little
The assessment tax on land, which paid the occupying army, increased steadily during the 1650s, and soon out-stripped the capacity of the Irish economy, slowly recovering from over a decade of war. Matters came to a head in 1657, when there were efforts by Irish M.P.s at Westminster to reduce the rate, and also pressure from Protestant landowners on the Dublin government to change the way in which
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Sylvester O'Halloran's influence on medicine in eighteenth-century Ireland Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Pierce A. Grace
Sylvester O'Halloran was a prominent surgeon in late eighteenth-century Limerick. He wrote extensively on medicine, history and antiquarianism. His contribution to medicine included a series of monographs on eye disease, limb amputation and head injury. Of these many publications only his work on head injury was of clinical significance. His proposals to standardise the training and assessment of surgeons
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‘Our sacred and civil obligations as Christians and as Citizens’: religion, charity and governance in early nineteenth-century Dublin and Edinburgh Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Joe Curran
Recent historiography gives an increasingly nuanced picture of interactions between religion and wider society in nineteenth-century Ireland. Yet, when considering the relationships between religion and philanthropy, something central to everyday life in urban centres, emphasis is still placed on the role of the institutional Catholic Church, and there is a sense that lay Catholics were less involved
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‘Many attend chiefly in search of pleasure’: the Great National Horse Show at the Royal Dublin Society, 1868–80 Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Sherra Murphy
This paper explores the foundation of the Dublin Horse Show from 1868–80, when it was held at the Royal Dublin Society's (R.D.S.) headquarters on Merrion Square. Early iterations were intended to address the depletion of the equine population in the mid-nineteenth century, a matter of concern for agriculture and industry, but also for those with an interest in sport and horses as opportunities for
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Revolution and nationalism in Treatyite political thought, 1891–1924 Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Seán Donnelly
The last fifty years have witnessed the production of a large body of scholarship exploring the political and social history of the Irish Civil War and its aftermath. Debate has focused principally on the administrative abilities and democratic credentials of the Free State government and the extent to which revolutionary ideals were expressed institutionally following the ratification of the Anglo-Irish
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Introduction: a new agenda for women's and gender history in Ireland Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Frances Nolan, Bronagh McShane
In the thirty years since the publication of ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland’, the study of women's and gender history has been transformed. The introduction to this special issue contextualises the ‘Agenda’ within this evolving landscape, underlining the significant role it played in stimulating scholarship by outlining some of the major developments in the field since 1992. The introduction
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Margaret MacCurtain (1929–2020): an appreciation Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Mary O'Dowd
‘Wisdom it was I loved and searched for her from my youth. I resolved to have her as my companion. I fell in love with her beauty ….’At the funeral mass for Margaret MacCurtain, her grandnephew, Michael, read the first reading from the Book of Wisdom, a moving and appropriate text with which to begin a celebration of Margaret's life. The words carried an added significance as Michael's reading emphasised
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The challenge of writing histories of ‘women’: the case of women and the law in late medieval Ireland Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Sparky Booker
Critiques of women's history based on intersectional analysis have demonstrated the importance of recognising differences between women and the perils of assuming commonality of experience based on gender. The idea that we can treat women as a group in some meaningful way is further complicated in medieval legal history by the fact that women's legal entitlements differed depending on their marital
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Progress, challenges and opportunities in early modern gender history, c.1550–1720 Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Clodagh Tait
Following some of the themes of the original ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’ and others that were not as prominent, this article considers progress since 1992 and highlights opportunities for the further development of Irish early modern women's and gender history. It considers aspects of the life cycle of women and men, especially birth, youth and marriage; the economic roles
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Networking early modern Irish women Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Evan Bourke
Over the last decade, network analysis has developed as an approach within digital humanities as a wider array of tools has become available to humanities scholars, and these approaches are now beginning to make an impact on the disciplines of history and English. This article presents an overview of different ways of approaching network analysis. It assesses recent projects to see how they accounted
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The textual terrain: developments and directions in women's writing, 1500–1700 Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Marie-Louise Coolahan
This article assesses our much-expanded view of the texts produced by early modern women in Ireland, surveying what is available to present-day researchers and considering emerging methodologies for the analysis of early modern female voices. The range of genres with which we now know early modern women engaged owes much to feminist literary historians’ capacious approach to defining literature, expanding
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‘From a woman's point of view’: the Presbyterian archive as a source for women's and gender history in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Leanne Calvert
This article responds to ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’ by highlighting the explanatory potential of the Presbyterian archive in extending and reshaping our understanding of women, gender and the family in Ireland. Discussed here as the ‘Presbyterian archive’, the records of the Presbyterian church offer a tantalising insight into the intimate worlds of women and men in eighteenth-
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Developing an agenda for the history of women religious in Ireland: historiography and potentiality Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Deirdre Raftery
In ‘An Agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’ (1992), Margaret MacCurtain, Mary O'Dowd and Maria Luddy noted that research on convents and women religious (nuns/sisters) in Ireland was beginning to open up in the 1980s. They also suggested areas that merited the attention of scholars, including the experience of vowed religious life by women, issues of class and power within Irish convents
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Exploring the ordinary: migration, sexuality and crime, and the progression of the ‘Agenda’ in Irish women's history, 1850s–1950s Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Elaine Farrell, Leanne McCormick, Jennifer Redmond
This article reflects on some developments in women's history based on the 1992 ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’, particularly responding to the section authored by Maria Luddy, incorporating work grounded in the nineteenth century up to the first half of the twentieth. Specifically, it considers developments in Irish women's social history over the past thirty years on the period
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Derbforgaill: twelfth-century abductee, patron and wife Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Seán Ó Hoireabhárd
This paper explores the themes of abduction, patronage, female wealth and marital relationships through their intersection in the life of Derbforgaill (d. 1193), whose abduction in 1152 sparked a chain of events that contributed to the English invasion of Ireland. Derbforgaill is also remembered for her donations to Mellifont in 1157, during the consecration of its ‘church of the monks’, and to the
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Hugh O'Neill in Irish historical discourse, c.1550–2021 Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Nicholas Canny
An analysis of the multiple publications relating to the career of Hugh O'Neill that appeared during the middle decades of the twentieth century reveals the extent to which authors who were then writing about the past permitted their interpretations to be influenced by the politics and prejudices of their own time. It is then demonstrated that the various positions then adopted by competing authors
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Towards a ‘world-wide empire of the Gael’: nationalism, identity, and the Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society, 1912–22 Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Patrick Mannion
In the early twentieth century, Irish ethnic, benevolent and mutual benefit associations around the world became part of the transnational fight for Irish freedom, utilising large, widespread memberships to raise funds and lobby for Irish independence. In Australia and New Zealand the largest such group was the Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society (H.A.C.B.S.), which boasted some 41,000
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Faith and fatherland? The Ancient Order of Hibernians, northern nationalism and the partition of Ireland Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Martin O'Donoghue
In 1912, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (A.O.H.) had become the most significant nationalist organisation in Ulster, a powerful auxiliary to the Irish Parliamentary Party, and a key part of what unionists feared would be Rome rule in a self-governed Ireland. However, while the A.O.H. is crucial to understanding nationalist Ulster and the border question, its reputation for fraternal secrecy and the
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The Belfast Boycott: consumerism and gender in revolutionary Ireland (1920–1922) Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Katie Omans
The Belfast Boycott was a protest designed to dislodge loyalism in Northern Ireland, punish its adherents for perceived intolerance toward Catholics and end Irish partition. The boycott was set off by the expulsion of several thousand Catholic workers from employment in Belfast in July 1920. A total boycott of all goods coming from Belfast was implemented by the Dáil in September 1920. Boycotting provided
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They ‘never dared say “boo” while the British were here’: the postal strike of 1922 and the Irish Civil War Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Gerard Hanley
This article examines the causes and consequences of the 1922 postal strike which was the first nationwide strike to occur following the establishment of the Irish Free State. In the eyes of the government, the dispute was as much a threat to its authority as that posed by anti-Treatyies, and it was resolved to crush both. The significance of the postal dispute within the annals of Irish labour history
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‘Her own and her children's share’: luck, misogyny and imaginative resistance in twentieth-century Irish folklore Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Christina S. Brophy
In twentieth-century Irish folklore, luck had much to do with women. While women were rarely seen as legitimate possessors of good fortune, luck was frequently perceived as being communicated through women's bodies and lost as a result of their actions. A caul, an intact amniotic membrane over a newborn's head and by-product of a pregnant woman's body, was believed to convey luck and health to either
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The gender politics of marriage in Ireland Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Lindsey Earner-Byrne
It is rare that a book's dedication is quite so apposite to its theme as Maria Luddy and Mary O'Dowd's in their new history of marriage, which reads: ‘For Mary Cullen and Margaret MacCurtain who began it all.’ Indeed, they did, and this tour de force is a fitting testament to the significance of that women's history project started in the 1970s, which has ‘paved the way for all of us who engage with
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Medieval Irish medical verse in the nineteenth century: some evidence from material culture Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Deborah Hayden
This article presents an edition and translation of an Irish didactic poem found in a large compilation of remedies, charms and prayers that was written in the early sixteenth century by the Roscommon medical scribe Conla Mac an Leagha. The contents of this poem, and of the treatise in which it occurs more generally, are of inherent interest for our understanding of the history of medical learning
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Crowds and political violence in early modern Ireland: Galway and the 1641 depositions Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-24 John Walter
This article offers a critical analysis of the representation of early modern popular violence provided by the 1641 depositions. Exploring the problems of how reported ‘speech’ was produced and recorded in the 1641 depositions, the article challenges the tendency within the depositions to represent violence as a spontaneous and immediate act, explicable by a racialised reading of Irish ‘barbarity’
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Irish overseers in the antebellum U.S. South Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Joe Regan
This article aims to further understand the Irish immigrant experience with U.S. slavery by studying Irish overseers on southern plantations. The Irish relationship with U.S. slavery varied according to circumstances. However, as foreign-born outsiders, Irish immigrants in the South had to accommodate the region's slaveholding culture. This article takes the story of the Irish as urban pioneers of
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Factory and workshop legislation and convent laundries, 1895–1907: campaigning for a Catholic exception Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Bridget Harrison
Convents and convent-run institutions occupied an undefined legal space during the late nineteenth century. As homes for unmarried women, they combined religious ideas of holy seclusion with contemporary ideas of the feminine private sphere. However, women religious were also major providers of charity and welfare in Britain and Ireland, with many running charitable institutions. This brought them
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Queer Belfast during the First World War: masculinity and same-sex desire in the Irish city Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Tom Hulme
Queer history is still in its infancy in Ireland, with political approaches and the more recent past, and the gay rights movement particularly, providing the primary focus so far. This article takes a different approach by investigating the everyday experiences, identities and policing of men who had sex with men in the early twentieth century. Using two extraordinary case studies from Belfast during
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‘A real revolution’: Ireland and the Oxford Group/Moral Re-Armament movement, 1933–2001 Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Bernadette Whelan
During the twentieth century, Ireland, north and south, was infiltrated to varying degrees by a transnational quasi-religious and political movement, Moral Re-Armament (M.R.A.). From its founding in the early 1920s by an American evangelist and former Lutheran pastor, Frank Buchman, through the peak of moral revivalism in the 1930s, its Cold War work after 1945 and its reinvention as a secular, multi-faith
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Rediscovering poverty: moneylending in the Republic of Ireland in the 1960s Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Carole Holohan, Sean O'Connell, Robert J. Savage
In 1969 R.T.É.'s 7 Days dealt with the issue of illegal moneylending, claiming that Dublin was ‘a city of fear’ where 500 unlicensed moneylenders used violence as a tool to collect debts. The Fianna Fáil government rejected the suggestion that loan sharking was widespread and that Gardaí responses to it were ineffectual; a tribunal of inquiry was established to investigate 7 Days. Previous analyses
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Round table: Decolonising Irish history? Possibilities, challenges, practices Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, Shahmima Akhtar, Dónal Hassett, Kevin Kenny, Laura McAtackney, Ian McBride, Timothy G. McMahon, Jane Ohlmeyer
The nature of Ireland's place within the British Empire continues to attract significant public and scholarly attention. While historians of Ireland have long accepted the complexity of Ireland's imperial past as both colonised and coloniser, the broader public debate has grown more heated in recent months, buffeted by Brexit, the Decade of Centenaries and global events. At the same time, the imperatives
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Transhumance and the making of Ireland's uplands, 1550–1900. By Eugene Costello. Pp 240. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. 2020. £75 hardback. Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Liam Kennedy
This is a remarkable study in terms of its chronological sweep, its use of diverse sources and its multi-disciplinary approach to the past. It grapples with the elusive traces left in the Irish landscape by a form of pastoral farming known in the international literature as transhumance and in Ireland as booleying. The author employs archaeological field work, soil science, documentary evidence, place
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Women, crime and punishment in Ireland: life in the nineteenth-century convict prison. By Elaine Farrell. Pp 292. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. £75. Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Ciara Breathnach
established position of the Church of Ireland. It was not until after the disestablishment of this church in 1871 that Presbyterians joined in larger numbers. Consideration of the religious composition of the order would have complimented the author’s important analysis on class. For example, the grand lodgewas almost exclusively Anglican because it was dominated by the landed classes. This affected
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The unstoppable Irish: songs and integration of the New York Irish, 1783–1883. By Dan Milner. Pp 294. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 2019. $40 hardback. Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Damian Shiels
many of what Brundage terms the ‘ongoing work of political imagination and discursive invention’ that was central to advancing Irish nationalist ideas (p. 5). Arranged chronologically, the book journeys from the Tones and the exiles of 1798 through to the Good Friday Agreement at the close of the twentieth century. Each chapter succinctly contextualises events in America by providing a backdrop of
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The daughters of the first earl of Cork: writing family, faith, politics and place. By Ann-Maria Walsh. Pp 178. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2020. €45 hardback. Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Clodagh Tait
licit resistance to the end of the seventeenth century. This counter discourse existed not just in legal textbooks but also on the streets of the cities that De Benedictis examines. Historians of Ireland might wish to read these arguments alongside Kenneth Nicholls’s remarks on the obsessively centralised nature of English monarchy, and the studies of F. W. Maitland and Alan Orr on the history of treason
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Irish nationalists in America: the politics of exile, 1798–1998. By David Brundage. Pp 288. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016 (paperback edition 2019). £19.99 paperback. Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Damian Shiels
inent figures like Fitzgibbon, Gowan and O’Callaghan were atypical. They may well have been revered in some circles as exemplars of Irish masculinity, but the majority of Irishmen neither aspired to nor had the opportunities to emulate them. Most were concerned with the humdrum of daily existence, like the 50,000 or so Irish who arrived at the port of Quebec between 1815 and 1824 and invariably found
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The darkness echoing: exploring Ireland's places of famine, death and rebellion. By Gillian O'Brien. Pp 373. Dublin: Doubleday Ireland. 2020. €21 paperback. Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Sinéad McCoole
action on health reform could be viewed as radical, progressive and independent. Ireland in consequence was ahead of Britain and much of Europe in the enactment of childhood immunisation schemes. Despite this stance, it took years for a successful immunisation scheme in Ireland to be implemented. Dwyer chronicles the initiatives undertaken and reveals the many factors which helped or held back the
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This road of mine. By Seosamh Mac Grianna, transl. Mícheál Ó hAodha. Pp 232. Dublin: Lilliput Press. 2020. €15. Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Angela Byrne
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Strangling angel: diphtheria and childhood immunization in Ireland. By Michael Dwyer. Pp 212. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2018. £85/£24.95. Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Ruth Coon
culture such as cycling and hostelling afforded new recreational opportunities, and the more general rise of the countryside as a site of mass leisure. Subsequent chapters are more overtly concerned with the politics of making photographs, from theways different working-class communities were encouraged to represent themselves in the 1970s and 1980s, to press photographers in Northern Ireland, to photography
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The history of physical culture in Ireland. By Conor Heffernan. Pp 280. Cham: Palgrave. 2021. €96 hardback. Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Seán Donnelly
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Under the starry flag: how a band of Irish Americans joined the Fenian revolt and sparked a crisis over citizenship. By Lucy E. Salyer. Pp 316. Cambridge, MS and London: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2018. €27/$29.95 hardback. Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Damian Shiels
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Religion, civility and the ‘British’ of Ireland in the 1641 Irish rebellion Irish Historical Studies Pub Date : 2021-05-25 Joan Redmond
This article examines the 1641 Irish rebellion through a neglected manuscript account from 1643, written by Henry Jones and three of his 1641 deposition colleagues. The ‘Treatise’ offers important insights into the rebellion, but also advances a broader understanding of the significance of the early modern efforts to civilise Ireland and the impact of these schemes, especially plantation, on the kind