Urban Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Ireland


Book Description

Urban spaces in nineteenth-century Ireland offers new insights on the Irish urban experience by exploring the ways in which urban spaces, from individual buildings to streets and districts, were constructed and experienced during the nineteenth century.




Growing Up in Nineteenth-century Ireland


Book Description

A comprehensive cultural history of childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland, which explores how the notion of childhood fluctuated depending on class, gender, and religious identity, and presents invaluable new insights into Irish boarding schools, the material culture of childhood, and the experience of boys and girls in education.




Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-century Ireland


Book Description

The environmental humanities are one of the most exciting and rapidly expanding areas of interdisciplinary study, and this collection of essays is a pioneering attempt to apply these approaches to the study of nineteenth-century Ireland. By bringing together historians, geographers and literary scholars, new insights are offered into familiar subjects and unfamiliar subjects are brought out into the light. Essays re-considering O'Connellism, Lord Palmerston and Isaac Butt rub shoulders with examinations of agricultural improvement, Dublin's animal geographies and Ireland's healing places. Literary writers like Emily Lawless and Seumas O'Sullivan are looked at anew, encouraging us to re-think Darwinian influences in Ireland and the history of the Irish literary revival, and transnational perspectives are brought to bear on Ireland's national park history and the dynamics of Irish natural history. Much modern Irish history is concerned with access to natural resources, whether this reflects the catastrophic effect of the Great Famine or the conflicts associated with agrarian politics, but historical and literary analyses are rarely framed explicitly in these terms. The collection responds to the 'material turn' in the humanities and contemporary concern about the environment by re-imagining Ireland's nineteenth century in fresh and original ways. List of contributors: Matthew Kelly, Helen O'Connell, David Brown, Colin W. Reid, Huston Gilmore, Ronan Foley, Juliana Adelman, Mary Orr, Patrick Maume and Seán Hewitt.







Middle-class Life in Victorian Belfast


Book Description

Middle-Class Life in Victorian Belfast vividly reconstructs the social world of upper middle-class Belfast from c.1830 to 1890. Using extensive primary material, the book draws a rich portrait of Belfast's middle-class society, covering themes of civic activism, working lives, philanthropy, associational culture, evangelicalism, recreation, marriage and family life.




A Guide to Spatial History


Book Description

This guide provides an overview of the thematic areas, analytical aspects, and avenues of research which, together, form a broader conversation around doing spatial history. Spatial history is not a field with clearly delineated boundaries. For the most part, it lacks a distinct, unambiguous scholarly identity. It can only be thought of in relation to other, typically more established fields. Indeed, one of the most valuable utilities of spatial history is its capacity to facilitate conversations across those fields. Consequently, it must be discussed in relation to a variety of historiographical contexts. Each of these have their own intellectual genealogies, institutional settings, and conceptual path dependencies. With this in mind, this guide surveys the following areas: territoriality, infrastructure, and borders; nature, environment, and landscape; city and home; social space and political protest; spaces of knowledge; spatial imaginaries; cartographic representations; and historical GIS research.




Public History in Ireland


Book Description

Through a collection of essays that reflect the complexity of the island’s historical past as it operates today, Public History in Ireland delivers a scholarly yet accessible introduction to contemporary topics and debates in Irish public history. Despite the reputation that Ireland, both north and south, has gained as a place of contestation, this is the first book-length study to tackle its diverse and often ‘difficult’ public histories. Public History in Ireland offers examples drawn not only from museums, heritage and collections, prime mediators of public historical interpretation, but also from the work of artists and academics. It considers the silences in Ireland’s history-telling, including those of the recent conflict in Northern Ireland and of the traumatic public discoveries and re-evaluations of the island’s institutions of social control. The book’s key message is that history is active, making itself felt in ongoing debates about heritage, identity, nationhood, post-conflict society and reparative justice. It shows that Irish public history is freighted and often fraught with jeopardy, but as such it is rich with insight that has relevance far beyond this island’s shores. This book is useful for students, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of public history and the history of Ireland.




The First Great Charity of This Town


Book Description

Belfast Charitable Society was established in 1752 with the purpose of raising funds to build a poorhouse and hospital for the poor of Belfast; twenty years later, the foundation stone of the Poorhouse was laid. From here the Society would go on to assume increasing responsibility for a range of matters relating to health, welfare and public order, and its members would play a key part in the civic life of Belfast. It continues to provide vital social services to this day and its Poorhouse, now Clifton House, is still one of the finest buildings in the city. During the century following the establishment of the Society, Belfast was transformed from a relatively small mercantile town into a major industrial city, a transformation that was accompanied by political upheaval and the major societal challenges associated with rapid industrialisation and urban growth. Taking as its focus the work of the Society, the global connections that influenced its thinking and the societal issues it sought to address, this fascinating volume provides valuable insights into the wider social, economic and political life of the nineteenth-century Irish town of which the Society became such an iconic part.




Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947


Book Description

This edited collection explores the complexities of Irish involvement in empire. Despite complaining regularly of treatment as a colony by England, Ireland nevertheless played a significant part in Britain’s imperialism, from its formative period in the late eighteenth century through to the decolonizing years of the early twentieth century. Framed by two key events of world history, the American Revolution and Indian Independence, this book examines Irish involvement in empire in several interlinked sections: through issues of migration and inhabitation; through literary and historical representations of empire; through Irish support for imperialism and involvement with resistance movements abroad; and through Irish participation in the extensive and intricate networks of empire. Informed by recent historiographical and theoretical perspectives, and including several detailed archival investigations, this volume offers an interdisciplinary and evolving view of a burgeoning field of research and will be of interest to scholars of Irish studies, imperial and postcolonial studies, history and literature.




Communities of Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland


Book Description

The nineteenth century was an important period for both the proliferation of "popular" science and for the demarcation of a group of professionals that we now term scientists. Of course for Ireland, largely in contrast to the rest of Britain, the prominence of Catholicism posed various philosophical questions regarding research. Adelman's study examines the practical educational impact of the growth of science in these communities, and the impact of this on the country's economy; the role of museums and exhibitions in spreading scientific knowledge; and the role that science had to play in Ireland's turbulent political context. Adelman challenges historians to reassess the relationship between science and society, showing that the unique situation in Victorian Ireland can nonetheless have important implications for wider European interpretations of the development of this relationship during a period of significant change.