Nick Maxwell PF: To what extent was a sense of Irish ethnicity a factor drawing you towards an academic interest in Irish Studies and particularly Irish migration? KM: Only in retrospect. Being born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, one primarily thought of oneself as being white as against others who were not. There was a much less … Read more
In June 1541 King Henry VIII began to style himself ‘king of Ireland’, abandoning the title of ‘lord’ which English kings had used for four centuries. It has long been assumed that the English kings from Henry II to Henry VII were content to rule Ireland as lords, but the events of the later years … Read more
The Irish question was a constant source of concern and debate in the nineteenth-century British press, but perhaps never more so than in the mid-1880s and early 1890s, when almost every newspaper and journal offered extensive commentary on the first two Irish Home Rule bills. Comic weeklies such as Punch, Fun and Judy were no … Read more
John Redmond and his party have been treated kindly by academic historians. For the most part, they have accepted the view of his followers, Stephen and Denis Gwynn, that he was a man of immense achievement brought low by factors outside his control, notably the chauvinism of the British War Office and the literal bloody-mindedness … Read more
In March 1919 Benito Mussolini, a socialist turned nationalist, founded a new movement in Milan that became known as ‘fascism’. The fasces—a bound bundle of sticks—had been a symbol of republican unity in ancient Rome. For Mussolini they signified the unity of the nation, and in particular the incorporation into Italy of all Italian-speaking territories … Read more