Nick Maxwell

How much did Irish relations with the Commonwealth change after 1949? By Ben Wynne The history of Ireland’s membership of the Commonwealth is well known but the country’s relations with the Commonwealth after 1949 have received less attention. In 1948 the Commonwealth consisted of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and, following … Read more

The Harvard Irish Study, 1930–6. By Anne Byrne and Eoin O’Sullivan Family and community in Ireland, first published in 1940 by Conrad Maynadier Arensberg and Solon Toothaker Kimball, is one of the most influential texts in Irish rural sociology and anthropology. The Harvard Irish Study (1930–6) was composed of three strands—physical anthropology, archaeology and social … Read more

By Fiona Fitzsimons The medieval church practised ‘churching’ as a rite of purification and thanksgiving for the safe delivery of a woman after the birth of her child. It marked the end of the ‘green month’ of the woman’s confinement and her resumption of normal domestic life and sexual relations with her husband. At the Reformation … Read more

The 1916 Easter Rising proved to be the spark that ignited the tensions within Basque nationalism. By Kyle McCreanor Historians have recently taken a greater interest in the global context of the Irish revolutionary period (1913–23) and in its international reverberations, which were felt even in the Basque Country, a region straddling the Western Pyrenees … Read more

A microcosm of the third Home Rule crisis. By M.C. Rast In several important ways, the third Home Rule crisis had little to do with Ireland; it was as much a British political dilemma as an Irish one, and played out throughout the United Kingdom. To many British politicians, Home Rule was a continuation of … Read more