The Invisible Irish


Book Description

In spite of the many historical studies of Irish Protestant migration to America in the eighteenth century, there is a noted lack of study in the transatlantic migration of Irish Protestants in the nineteenth century. The main hindrance in rectifying this gap has been finding a method with which to approach a very difficult historiographical problem. The Invisible Irish endeavours to fill this blank spot in the historical record. Rankin Sherling imaginatively uses the various bits of available data to sketch the first outline of the shape of Irish Presbyterian migration to America in the nineteenth century. Using the migration of Irish Presbyterian ministers as "tracers" of a larger migration, Sherling demonstrates that eighteenth-century migration of Protestants reveals much about the completely unknown nineteenth-century migration. An original and creative blueprint of Irish Presbyterian migration in the nineteenth century, The Invisible Irish calls into question many of the assumptions that the history of Irish migration to America is built upon.




Gender and History


Book Description

This book provides an overview of Irish gender history from the end of the Great Famine in 1852 until the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922. It builds on the work that scholars of women’s history pioneered and brings together internationally regarded experts to offer a synthesis of the current historiography and existing debates within the field. The authors place emphasis on highlighting new and exciting sources, methodologies, and suggested areas for future research. They address a variety of critical themes such as the family, reproduction and sexuality, the medical and prison systems, masculinities and femininities, institutions, charity, the missions, migration, ‘elite women’, and the involvement of women in the Irish nationalist/revolutionary period. Envisioned to be both thematic and chronological, the book provides insight into the comparative, transnational, and connected histories of Ireland, India, and the British empire. An important contribution to the study of Irish gender history, the volume offers opportunities for students and researchers to learn from the methods and historiography of Irish studies. It will be useful for scholars and teachers of history, gender studies, colonialism, post-colonialism, European history, Irish history, Irish studies, and political history. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.




The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History


Book Description

Draws from a wide range of disciplines to bring together 36 leading scholars writing about 400 years of modern Irish history




The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume 3, 1730–1880


Book Description

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an era of continuity as well as change. Though properly portrayed as the era of 'Protestant Ascendancy' it embraces two phases - the eighteenth century when that ascendancy was at its peak; and the nineteenth century when the Protestant elite sustained a determined rear-guard defence in the face of the emergence of modern Catholic nationalism. Employing a chronology that is not bound by traditional datelines, this volume moves beyond the familiar political narrative to engage with the economy, society, population, emigration, religion, language, state formation, culture, art and architecture, and the Irish abroad. It provides new and original interpretations of a critical phase in the emergence of a modern Ireland that, while focused firmly on the island and its traditions, moves beyond the nationalist narrative of the twentieth century to provide a history of late early modern Ireland for the twenty-first century.




Unhappy the Land


Book Description

In Unhappy the Land Liam Kennedy poses fundamental questions about the social and political history of Ireland and challenges cherished notions of a uniquely painful past. Images of tragedy and victimhood are deeply embedded in the national consciousness, yet when the Irish experience is viewed in the larger European context a different perspective emerges. The author’s dissection of some pivotal episodes in Irish history serves to explode commonplace assumptions about oppression, victimhood and a fate said to be comparable ‘only to that of the Jews’. Was the catastrophe of the Great Famine really an Irish Holocaust? Was the Ulster Covenant anything other than a battle-cry for ethnic conflict? Was the Proclamation of the Irish Republic a means of texting terror? And who fears to speak of an Irish War of Independence, shorn of its heroic pretensions? Kennedy argues that the privileging of ‘the gun, the drum and the flag’ above social concerns and individual liberties gave rise to disastrous consequences for generations of Irish people. Ireland might well be a land of heroes, from Cúchulainn to Michael Collins, but it is also worth pondering Bertolt Brecht’s warning: ‘Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.’




Ireland in the World


Book Description

This international edited book collection of ten original contributions from established and emerging scholars explores aspects of Ireland’s place in the world since the 1780s. It imaginatively blends comparative, transnational, and personal perspectives to examine migration in a range of diverse geographical locations including Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Argentina, Jamaica, and the British Empire more broadly. Deploying diverse sources including letters, interviews, press reports, convict records, and social media, contributors canvas important themes such as slavery, convicts, policing, landlordism, print culture, loyalism, nationalism, sectarianism, politics, and electronic media. A range of perspectives including Catholic and Protestant, men and women, convicts and settlers are included, and the volume is accompanied by a range of striking images.




Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History


Book Description

This book explores the benefits and challenges of transnational history for the study of modern Ireland. In recent years the word "transnational" has become more and more conspicuous in history writing across the globe, with scholars seeking to move beyond national and local frameworks when investigating the past. Yet transnational approaches remain rare in Irish historical scholarship. This book argues that the broader contexts and scales associated with transnational history are ideally suited to open up new questions on many themes of critical importance to Ireland’s past and present. They also provide an important means of challenging ideas of Irish exceptionalism. The chapters included here open up new perspectives on central debates and events in Irish history. They illuminate numerous transnational lives, follow flows and ties across Irish borders, and trace networks and links with Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Australia and the British Empire. This book provides specialists and students with examples of different concepts and ways of doing transnational history. Non-specialists will be interested in the new perspectives offered here on a rich variety of topics, particularly the two major events in modern Irish history, the Great Irish Famine and the 1916 Rising.




Religion and Greater Ireland


Book Description

Impelled by economic deprivation at home and spiritual ambition abroad, nineteenth-century Irish clerics and laypeople reshaped the many sites where they came to pray, preach, teach, trade, and settle. So decisive was the role of religion in the worlds of Irish settlement that it helped to create a "Greater Ireland" that encompassed the entire English-speaking world and beyond. Rejecting the popular notion that the Irish were passive victims of imperial oppression, Religion and Greater Ireland demonstrates how religion opened up a vast world to exploit. The religious free market of the United States and the British Empire provided an opportunity and a level playing-field in which the Irish could compete and thrive. Contributors to this collection show how the Irish of all denominations contributed to the creation and extension of Greater Ireland through missionary and temperance societies, media, and the circulation of people, ideas, and material culture around the world. Essays also detail the diverse experiences of Irish immigrants, whether they were Catholics or Protestants, clergy or laypeople, women or men, in sites of settlement and mission including the United States, Canada, South Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland itself. Seeking to illuminate the interconnections and commonalities of the Irish migrant experience, Religion and Greater Ireland provides fascinating insight into the range of influences that Ireland’s religions have had on the world beyond the British Isles.




Historical Dictionary of Ireland


Book Description

All places undergo change, but in few has this change been quite as sweeping as Ireland – both the independent Republic of Ireland and dependent Northern Ireland – so it is good to see where it is heading at present. Obviously, that has to be judged on the background of where it is coming from, not only over the past decade or so but over centuries and, indeed, millennia. This new edition of Historical Dictionary of Ireland is an excellent resource for discovering the history of Ireland. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The cross-referenced dictionary section has over 600 entries on significant persons, places and events, political parties and institutions (including the Catholic church) with period forays into literature, music and the arts. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Ireland.