Land and Liberalism


Book Description

Connecting popular attitudes and social practices with political ideas, Land and Liberalism shows how Irish land in the 1880s was a site of ideological conflict and demonstrates the centrality of Henry George and the Irish Land War to the transformation of liberal thought.




Defying the Law of the Land


Book Description

This history of Ireland is inextricably linked with our relationship with the land. In this book, based on extensive research and investigation, the authors examine some of the key figures in Irish agrarian agitation and change.Looking at the Land League, the Knights of the Plough, the perception and reality of the Irish Landlords, this is an important book which makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the nature of the ‘land question’ in Irish history.




Puck Fair


Book Description

Puck Fair, Ireland's oldest festival, was established by a royal patent in October 1613, granted to the Welsh planter, Jenkyn Conway, of Killorglin. It first became a famous, however, as a result of the parading and display of a male goat, which is awarded a crown and named as the King of the Town. 2013 saw the celebration of Puck Fair's 400 year anniversary, which was promoted and celebrated as part of The Gathering. This book was launched in August of that year, as part of these festivities.




Land Is All That Matters


Book Description

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe everyone lived 'off the land' in one way or another. In Ireland, however, almost everyone lived 'on the land' as well. Agriculture was the only economic resource for the vast majority of the population outside the north-east of the country. Land was vital. But most of it was owned by a class of Protestant, English and often aristocratic landlords. The dream of having more control over their farms, even of owning them, drove many of the most explosive conflicts in Irish history. Rebellions against British rule were rare, but savage outbreaks of murder related to resentments over land ownership, and draconian state repression, were a regular feature of Irish rural life. The struggle for the land was also crucial in driving support for Irish nationalist demands for Home Rule and independence. In this epic narrative, Myles Dungan examines two hundred years of agrarian conflict from the ruinous famine of 1741 to the eve of World War Two. It explores the pivotal moments that shaped Irish history: the rise of 'moonlighting', the infamous Whiteboys and Rightboys, the insurrection of Captain Rock, the Tithe War of 1831–36, the Great Famine of 1845 that devastated the country and drastically reduced the Irish population, and the Land War of 1878–1909, which ended by transferring almost all the landlords' holdings to their tenants. These events take place against the backdrop of prevailing British rule and stark class and wealth inequality. Land Is All that Matters tells the sweeping story of the agrarian revolution that fundamentally shaped modern Ireland.




Class and Community in Provincial Ireland, 1851–1914


Book Description

This book explores the experience of small farmers, labourers and graziers in provincial Ireland from the immediacy of the Famine until the eve of World War One. During this period of immense social and political change, they came to grips with the processes of modernisation. By focusing upon east Galway, it argues that they were not an inarticulate mass, but rather, they were sophisticated and politically aware in their own right. This study relies upon a wide array of sources which have been utilised to give as authentic a voice to the lower classes as possible. Their experiences have been largely unrecorded and this book redresses this imbalance in historiography while adding a new nuanced understanding of the complexities of class relations in provincial Ireland. This book argues that the actions of the rural working class and nationalists has not been fully understood, supporting E.P. Thompson’s argument that ‘their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experiences’.




A Wonderful Career in Crime


Book Description

Charles Cowlam’s career as a convict, spy, detective, congressional candidate, adventurer, and con artist spanned the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age. His life touched many of the most prominent figures of the era, including Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant. One contemporary newspaper reported that Cowlam “has as many aliases as there are letters in the alphabet.” He was a chameleon in a world of strangers, and scholars have overlooked him due to his elusive nature. His intrigues reveal how Americans built trust amid the transience and anonymity of the nineteenth century. The stories Cowlam told allowed him to blend in to new surroundings, where he quickly cultivated the connections needed to extract patronage from influential members of American society. Whereas historians of capitalism have uncovered the vulnerabilities of an economic system dependent upon trust and personal relationships, Cowlam’s life exposes the liabilities of a political system constructed on the same foundations. Rather than perpetrating frauds against average citizens, Cowlam reserved his most fantastic schemes for officials in the highest levels of government. He is the only person to receive presidential pardons from both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis during the Civil War. When the fighting ended, he conned his way into serving as a detective investigating Lincoln’s assassination, later parlaying that experience into positions with the Internal Revenue Service and the British government. Reconstruction offered additional opportunities for Cowlam to repackage his identity. He convinced Ulysses S. Grant to appoint him U.S. marshal and persuaded Republicans in Florida to allow him to run for Congress. After losing the election, Cowlam moved to New York, where he became a serial bigamist and started a fake secret society inspired by the burgeoning Granger movement. When the newspapers exposed his lies, he disappeared and spent the next decade living under an assumed name. He resurfaced in Dayton, Ohio, claiming to be a Union colonel suffering from dementia in an effort to gain admittance into the National Soldiers’ Home. In A Wonderful Career in Crime, Frank W. Garmon Jr. brings Cowlam’s stunning machinations to light for the first time.




Protest, Popular Culture and Tradition in Modern and Contemporary Western Europe


Book Description

Mock funerals, effigy parading, smearing with eggs and tomatoes, pot-banging and Carnival street theatre, arson and ransacking: all these seemingly archaic forms of action have been regular features of modern European protest, from the 19th to the 21st century. In a wide chronological and geographical framework, this book analyses the uses, meanings, functions and reactivations of folk imagery, behaviour and language in modern collective action. The authors examine the role of protest actors as diverse as peasants, liberal movements, nationalist and separatist parties, anarchists, workers, students, right-wing activists and the global justice movement. So-called traditional repertoires have long been described as residual and obsolete. This book challenges the conventional distinction between pre-industrial and post-1789 forms of collective action, which continues to operate as a powerful dichotomy in the understanding of protest, and casts new light on rituals and symbolic performances that, albeit poorly understood and deciphered, are integral to our protest repertoire.




Changing Land


Book Description

How diaspora activism in the Irish land movement intersected with wider radical and reform causes The Irish Land War represented a turning point in modern Irish history, a social revolution that was part of a broader ideological moment when established ideas of property and land ownership were fundamentally challenged. The Land War was striking in its internationalism, and was spurred by links between different emigrant locations and an awareness of how the Land League’s demands to lower rents, end evictions, and abolish “landlordism” in Ireland connected with wider radical and reform causes. Changing Land offers a new and original study of Irish emigrants’ activism in the United States, Argentina, Scotland, and England and their multifaceted relationships with Ireland. Niall Whelehan brings unfamiliar figures to the surface and recovers the voices of women and men who have been on the margins of, or entirely missing from, existing accounts. Retracing their transnational lives reveals new layers of radical circuitry between Ireland and disparate international locations, and demonstrates how the land movement overlapped with different types of oppositional politics from moderate reform to feminism to revolutionary anarchism. By including Argentina, which was home to the largest Irish community outside the English-speaking world, this book addresses the neglect of developments in non-Anglophone places in studies of the “Irish world.” Changing Land presents a powerful addition to our understanding of the history of modern Ireland and the Irish diaspora, migration, and the history of transnational radicalism.




The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume 4, 1880 to the Present


Book Description

This final volume in the Cambridge History of Ireland covers the period from the 1880s to the present. Based on the most recent and innovative scholarship and research, the many contributions from experts in their field offer detailed and fresh perspectives on key areas of Irish social, economic, religious, political, demographic, institutional and cultural history. By situating the Irish story, or stories - as for much of these decades two Irelands are in play - in a variety of contexts, Irish and Anglo-Irish, but also European, Atlantic and, latterly, global. The result is an insightful interpretation on the emergence and development of Ireland during these often turbulent decades. Copiously illustrated, with special features on images of the 'Troubles' and on Irish art and sculpture in the twentieth century, this volume will undoubtedly be hailed as a landmark publication by the most recent generation of historians of Ireland.




The Snake's Pass


Book Description

In 1890, The Snake’s Pass was published in serialized form in the periodical The People. It is the story of Arthur Severn, an Englishman who has inherited wealth and a title through an aunt who took him under her wing to the exclusion of closer relations. His inheritance includes land in Ireland, and now that he is a man of leisure, he decides to tour the west of Ireland. As Bram Stoker’s first full-length novel, The Snake’s Pass is a heady blend of romance, travel narrative, adventure tale, folk tradition, and national tale. This early novel shows that, long before Dracula, Stoker used the genre of the novel to engage with questions of identity, gender, ethnic stereotype, and imperialism. In this critical edition, Buchelt offers detailed and studied insight into both the novel and Stoker’s life, demonstrating the significance of The Snake’s Pass within the canon of late Victorian literature. The supplementary textual notes, scholarly material, and critical responses enhance the novel without distracting from the text. Readers will find a complexly layered and nuanced work that presents a pointed critique of British cultural attitudes and political positions concerning the Irish and Ireland.